


Whatever a Moon Has Always Meant

by hollycomb



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Infidelity, Grief/Mourning, Healing, M/M, Multi, Pre-Threesome, Threesome - M/M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 15:42:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 116,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2275344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollycomb/pseuds/hollycomb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Chekov is presumed dead, Kirk devotes himself to helping Sulu heal, falling in love with him in the process. Years later, as Sulu is beginning to return Kirk's feelings, Chekov shows up on the transport platform, the victim of a simple glitch, unaware than any time has passed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this back in 2010, mostly during a summer when I was unemployed. I have really fond memories of working on this all day in a hotel room in Denver, particularly the shore leave scene where Sulu and Kirk play Fire & Ice. I think the Kirk/Sulu love story is the strongest thing going here, but I did enjoy writing all the angst and complications, and I'd be curious even now to hear what people think of how I tried to end this story.

Kirk is on the bridge when it happens. He's been on the bridge for twelve hours, throughout the record-breaking ion storm and the attempt to get the away team back. He's been watching Sulu the whole time, waiting to see if he'll need to relieve him, because Chekov is one of the crewmen they're trying to recover. Sulu seems competent enough, aside from a slight shake in his hands, and he's got little more to do than sit at his station while Scotty tries to work out a solution.  
  
"Captain." It's Kirk's personal comm, not the ship-wide, which is strange. Kirk looks over at Spock, who raises an eyebrow.  
  
"Yeah, Scotty?"  
  
"You'd better come down here, sir."  
  
After two years of working with Montgomery Scott, Kirk has learned to recognize the moments when he shouldn't bother arguing, and they've never meant anything good before. He looks up at Sulu, who is half-turned from the conn, his lips parted.  
  
"I'll be right there," Kirk says to Scotty. He turns to Spock, and steps close. "If this – if it's –" He jerks his chin toward Sulu, and Spock nods in understanding.  
  
"I will remove Lieutenant Sulu from duty if necessary, sir."  
  
"Good. You've got the bridge. It's probably – it might not even come to that. Just –"  
  
"I am experiencing the same unoptimistic feeling, Captain."  
  
Kirk can see a sudden softness in Spock's eyes. It's subtle, but noticeable enough to someone who has spent the past two years learning to read Vulcan facial expressions. He tries not to take it as a sign that Chekov, Harrison and Jimenez are gone. He tries not to feel it in the walls of the ship as he walks through her hallways, noticing a new quiet, a kind of stunned suspension of the usual hum of the _Enterprise_ all around him. When he arrives at the transport bay, he finds Scotty and Lieutenant Arnett not at the console but standing in front of the empty platform, staring. They look like schoolboys who have just seen a dog get run over by a train.  
  
"Gentlemen," Kirk says, and he hates the sound of his own voice when they turn to him with their stricken faces, their open hands.  
  
"Captain," Scotty says.  
  
"Tell me." Kirk really did see a pair of schoolboys watch a dog get run over by a train, back in Iowa. It was one of the sonic speed, cross-country bullet trains, going so fast it was like the dog had never been there at all. One of the boys was his brother and the other was his best friend, and they'd both consoled him while he sobbed and beat the ground with his fists. It had been his dog.  
  
"They're gone, sir," Scotty says, his voice narrowing with each word. "We lost them."  
  
*  
  
Kirk fully expects Sulu to jump right over the initial stages of grief and on into anger, and it's almost a comfort when he does exactly that. Kirk gives him a one on one briefing on the disaster, in conference room 34-A, and Sulu tells Kirk that he's incompetent and lazy and wrong about Chekov being gone, then throws a chair at the wall.  
  
"Give me a suit," Sulu says, panting, his hands around the edge of the giant conference table like he's got enough adrenaline pumping through him to lift it over his head and throw it straight through the wall. "Give me a suit, I'll go get him, I'll do your fucking job for you –"  
  
"Hikaru, he's gone." Kirk is still in stage one: shock. He'll have to tell Jimenez's wife after he's finished with Sulu, and then he'll call all the parents, then there are the memorial services to plan, speeches to write. It's helpful to think about protocol, not the last time Chekov turned from the conn to flash him that bright smile, his face full of trust and admiration. Kirk's eyes water, and he stares down at the table.  
  
"You don't have a body!" Sulu screams, pounding the table with both fists. "So this bullshit proclamation that he's gone means nothing to me. If you want to leave these coordinates, fine, go, but I'm staying, because he's coming back, and there'd better be a fucking ship here waiting when he does."  
  
"Hikaru, it's impossible," Kirk says. He's afraid to meet Sulu's eyes, but he does, and he sees what he expected to: pure hatred, blame. The three of them had a special bond because of what happened on the drill, and the way Chekov saved them both. They were the points of a perfect triangle, Sulu and Chekov the sturdy base and Kirk at the top, leading the way. They were two of his best friends. He always knew that if he lost one of them, he would lose both.  
  
"You're a fucking coward to take Scotty at his word," Sulu says, and Kirk can hear the anger draining away, the conviction behind his words beginning to slip. He'd rather face ten thousand vicious insults than what will come next.  
  
"Maybe Scotty can explain it better than I can," Kirk says. "But I – Scotty knows this technology, Sulu. You know that, Chekov knew that –"  
  
"Don't you dare fucking talk about him in the past tense!" Sulu shouts, stomping over to Kirk. He grabs him by the front of his shirt and yanks him up out of his chair: insubordination. That's when Sulu notices, maybe, that Kirk's eyes are wet.  
  
"Hikaru, please," Kirk says. As soon as they walked into this room he knew he couldn't be Sulu's captain, not now; this is no place or time to pull rank. He wishes that he had taken a different approach, because he feels so small, and he knows that's not what Sulu needs from him, now or ever.  
  
"If there was anything I could do." Kirk touches his chest. He would offer his beating heart to bring Chekov back if he could, and the same goes for Jimenez, and Harrison, who he barely knew. But Chekov first, if he's honest. "You know I would do it, Hikaru, you know I would."  
  
"Goddammit." Sulu throws Kirk back into his chair and crumples to the floor. He sits there for awhile, breathing hard and looking around the room with thick confusion, like he's just pulled himself up from the ground after a head injury.  
  
"No, I just," Sulu says, and Kirk slides down to sit with him on the floor. "I just, I would know, Captain, I would." He looks up, and his eyes are still dry, which is not a good sign. Something in him is slipping away for good. Kirk saw it happen to his mother when Sam died.  
  
"I just." Sulu puts his hand on his chest, tapping it, trying to communicate something. "I would know, I was – inside him, and he – if he died, I would die, too, I would be dead, I don't have – oxygen, I can't, I wouldn't be able to breathe, I wouldn't – I wouldn't be here."  
  
"Hikaru." Kirk scoots closer, cautious, aware that the anger stage is not over and that it will come back tenfold as soon as Sulu musters the energy. Sulu doesn't seem to notice his closeness, just hyperventilates, his fingers scratching at the carpet like he wants to tunnel beneath it, to hide until this is over.  
  
"It can't be real because – because I'm still here," Sulu says. "I can't still be here, I would be gone, he would have –" He looks up at Kirk, his face clear of everything for a moment, like the beach before a tidal wave.  
  
"He would have taken me with him," Sulu says, and then he tries to smile, maybe, but his lips just shake.  
  
Kirk stays in conference room 34-A for another thirty minutes, Sulu's head in his lap, letting him shudder until his bones rattle, which is when Kirk knows that it's clinical shock. He motions for Bones, who has been waiting outside the whole time. Sulu whimpers at the press of the hypospray before it's even pricked him. It sounds like some kind of perverse expression of thanks, and when his face goes calm Kirk knows that he's hoping to never wake up again.  
  
*  
  
The next few weeks don't make much sense to anybody. Kirk feels half-alive, shuffling between the three memorial services, video calls with sobbing relatives, and official statements about the incident. Bones gets mad at him for forgetting to eat, then prescribes sleeping pills, which Kirk doesn't take. He deserves to suffer the long nights, and he spends most of them thinking about Sulu, who didn't come to any of the memorial services, not even Chekov's. Sulu still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Chekov is gone forever, but Kirk gets the feeling it's a formality at this point, that Sulu doesn't really believe in the delusion anymore. He's on his second week of bereavement leave, essentially catatonic, spending every day, all day, in the dark in Chekov's room, in his bed, under the blankets. Uhura has been able to force him to eat only a couple of times, and Bones has hypo'd nutrients into his system on the days when he wouldn't even lift his head from his pillow.  
  
Kirk goes to see Sulu once a day. He thinks of the room Sulu has retired to as the Temple of Chekov, and sits by the side of the bed scrolling through his memories of Chekov while Sulu sleeps, or lies behind him in silence, pretending not to know that he's there. During most of these visits Kirk thinks about the first time he realized that Chekov and Sulu were in love. The three of them were on an away mission with Spock, exploring a settlement on a remote planet that had been inexplicably evacuated. It was eerie, the empty buildings and the abandoned vehicles, the quiet. At one point, a Bytharian parrot flushed out of a tree and everybody startled, even Spock. Sulu jumped in front of Chekov like he was ready to take a bullet for him, and Chekov laughed, blushing and shoving Sulu a little as the parrot flew away. Sulu looked down at the ground, smiling, humiliated, then he looked up at Chekov, and what Kirk saw between them was a thing he had never believed in before then.  
  
"Captain, I believe the time has come to make a decision about Lieutenant Sulu," Spock says after three weeks. Kirk doesn't respond, just slouches in his chair, chewing on his thumbnail. They are approaching the last space station outpost they will be conveniently close to for months. It makes sense to evaluate Sulu now, to find him either fit or unfit and act accordingly. It's only logical.  
  
"I'll speak to him," Kirk says, though no one has spoken to Sulu since that first day, when all he would say was that Chekov wasn't dead, that he couldn't be, even if Scotty could prove that he'd been dismantled instantaneously by the worst sort of transporter malfunction. Blown away like dust. Kirk keeps having nightmares, and he doesn't want to think about what Sulu dreams of when he manages to sleep.  
  
Kirk goes to Chekov's room after his shift, and Sulu is there, as usual, in the bed, turned away from the door. He must get up to use the bathroom when he has to, but Kirk hasn't personally seen him move for weeks. He forgoes his usual place on the floor and sits on the end of the bed, sighing. Chekov's things are still laid out across the room just as they were when he left on the away mission: piles of crumpled clothes on the floor and empty cups on the bedside table. Every detail of the room is a sharp pin in Kirk's heart now, and to Sulu they must be like swords, things that slice him in half and keep him from standing.  
  
"Listen," Kirk says. His voice feels stale in this room, though he's done plenty of talking elsewhere, since the transporter incident.  
  
"I've got to make a decision about what do with you," Kirk says. "I'd like your input."  
  
Sulu doesn't stir, but Kirk knows he's awake. There's a certain smell in the room that might be described as death.  
  
"So," Kirk says. He feels thirteen years old again, sitting by his mother's bed in the stolid air of her bedroom, post-Sam. "Do you even want to stay?"  
  
He doesn't really expect an answer, and he flinches when Sulu speaks, his voice muffled by Chekov's old pillow and scratchy with disuse.  
  
"Yeah," Sulu says. "Here. This bed. The sheets, they still smell like him."  
  
"Well." A couple of weeks after Sam died, Kirk's mother slept out in the yard, on her back, staring up at the stars. Kirk brought her blankets so she wouldn't lose her toes to frostbite. He rubs his hand over his face and sighs.  
  
Two weeks ago, there was a party for Scotty's birthday, particularly rowdy, lots of whiskey that had been brewed in the engineering room, the good shit. Sulu and Chekov came together, Sulu got drunk and laughed too loud, hanging on Chekov's shoulders for most of the night, telling anyone who came near that Chekov was the smartest guy he'd ever met, _for real you guys_ , and that he felt inadequate in comparison. Chekov drank his share of whiskey but remained perkier than anyone there, reaching back to rub his hand over Sulu's ear while Sulu rocked him in his arms. He had an uncanny ability to attend to Sulu and ignore him at the same time, talking with Scotty about the new engine coolant system or with Riley about Bytharian pigeonball, never taking his careful fingers from Sulu's ear, never needing to give him anything more. Kirk has never seen anyone mourn something like that before; he was too young to know what was going on when his mother lost his father. He keeps getting snagged on the kind of mourning he does know: a mother losing a son, also mourning the fact that she still had one, and that she had to try to want to stay alive for one when the other was gone.  
  
"This is where all his stuff is," Sulu says. "So. I want to stay here."  
  
"In the bed? Because. I need you on the bridge, Lieutenant." Kirk has resolved to be professional. The way he handled things in the conference room didn't help anybody.  
  
Sulu is going to take a long time to respond to things now; that's clear. Kirk touches the blanket on the bed that was Chekov's, imagining that it's ectoplasmic, something that truly connects Sulu to wherever Chekov has gone. He feels like he's not allowed to be here, though he has clearance for every inch of this ship, within reason. He doesn't remember what it was like to know what was within reason. It's not like the three who were vaporized by the ion storm are the first crew he's lost; he's been losing crew since before he actually belonged here, that man named Olson who still screams in his nightmares, and in Sulu's, too. They told each other that once, marooned on Victus-4, where there was the possibility of freezing to death. They told each other a lot of things that night, and never spoke of them again. Kirk told Sulu about his brother, how he died, things he hasn't even told Bones, who doesn't know that Kirk had a brother. Sulu told Kirk that he was afraid everyday, constantly, that Chekov would grow bored and leave him. Neither of them really thought they were going to die, but the cold unlocked something in them that made them start talking as if they were sure that they would.  
  
"I can still fly the ship," Sulu says. "I mean." He turns over onto his back, and Kirk looks at him, but not into his eyes. "I don't know what else I would do." Sulu is looking up at the ceiling in a way that makes Kirk want to check it out, to see what's going on up there, but it feels like another thing he's not allowed to access in this too-quiet room.  
  
"You'll have to go through psychological evaluations before they'll let you back on the bridge," Kirk says. "Pretty extensive."  
  
"They?"  
  
"The Federation. Hikaru. There's protocol. Plus, you know. It's not like I won't recommend you for, uh. Counseling."  
  
Sulu looks at him then, and Kirk can still taste the name on his mouth: _Hikaru_. He doesn't call him that often, and probably nobody has since Chekov died. It's almost as bad as saying Chekov's first name, a thing too firmly attached to what's gone, like everything else Sulu has, something too soft for the way the world has become.  
  
"Counseling," Sulu says. He doesn't seem to have any real opinion about it, based on his tone. Another thing to add to the list of signs that are not good. Kirk is waiting for Sulu to get angry again, and if it doesn't happen soon Sulu might not feel anything else again, ever. Not the way he used to, anyway.  
  
"You remember," Kirk says. "What I told you about my brother."  
  
What a cheap thing to say, and what timing; he hates himself for it. Sulu just stares at him, blinks.  
  
"Why do you think I let you in here?" he says.  
  
*  
  
Kirk spends a lot of time with Bones, a fellow insomniac. For all his ranting about Kirk taking this or that to help him sleep, Bones doesn't really make much of an effort himself, and they drink coffee with whiskey long after their shifts, playing War with an old fashioned deck of cards, because apparently Bones played it with his father when he was a kid, whenever thunderstorms knocked the power out. That's what it feels like, this aftermath: something bigger than all of them that came and took the light away.  
  
"So, Sulu is scheduled for his first counseling session tomorrow," Bones says while they're staring down at their cards, satellite jazz playing in the background. They're in Bones' office, and sick bay is as silent as a tomb outside the half-open door.  
  
"I want to meet with the therapist," Kirk says. He had to talk with one after the Nero incident. It was a formality, and he mostly just got congratulated, his heart hammering his chest the whole time. She didn't ask him the questions he feared, and he felt betrayed by the ease of it, and relieved, of course.  
  
"It's Drexel," Bones says. "He's pretty good. But you know I don't believe in that horse shit."  
  
"Yeah, Bones, I know."  
  
"I don't believe in time healing all wounds, either."  
  
"Sure. Does anybody?"  
  
"Jim." Bones gives him a merciless look. "We might be kidding ourselves here. You remember Carlton."  
  
Carlton was a gamma shift communications officer, and his wife served on the _Nautilus_ until she died on an away mission. Upon hearing the news, Carlton destroyed his room and locked himself in one of the virtual reality chambers on the recreation deck, replaying one of the goriest battle simulations over and over, until Scotty finally figured out how to override the hack he'd configured. Carlton's hair was white when he came out.  
  
"Sulu is not Carlton," Kirk says. Sulu actually has the potential to come up with some far worse reaction, but it wouldn't be as graceless, or as public. Even when Sulu threw that chair in the conference room, he did it with a kind of dignity that he couldn't shake if he wanted to.  
  
"Sulu is a kid," McCoy says. "He's twenty-four years old."  
  
"Yeah. Only four years younger than me." And Chekov was four years younger than Sulu. Twenty years old. Dead.  
  
"Jim, c'mon. That's years you're talking about, fine. But we both know he's lived something of a – sheltered existence, compared to yours. No offense."  
  
"None taken." Kirk has been reading about Sulu's sheltered existence lately, to better equip himself as a captain dealing with a grieving crewman, and as a nosy friend who wishes he already knew the things he's been reading in Sulu's public and privileged files. Sulu grew up in San Francisco and has three older sisters, but everybody knows that. Kirk never knew, until he started snooping, that Sulu's father is a research biologist and his mother is a fairly accomplished pianist. He never knew that Sulu was valedictorian of his elite high school, or that he founded the Hybrid Orchid Society at the Academy. Sulu wanted to be a botanist until he took a flight class during his sophomore year at the Academy, just because his roommate was taking it, just for an elective. Kirk wished he had been there as he read a note from a professor about how flight changed Hikaru Sulu forever, how he found himself in it.  
  
Kirk was there to watch his pilot find himself in Chekov. He saw that first hand, from the very beginning, after Sulu thanked him on the transport platform and they walked toward the bridge together, their legs shaking so hard they felt like alien appendages that didn't really belong to them. Kirk was standing behind Sulu when he stopped at the transport console, where Chekov jumped to attention, trying to chew away his triumphant smile.  
  
"You?" Sulu had said, panting the word out, and Chekov nodded, his smile breaking free, making him look about twelve years old. Sulu and Kirk were both still standing there, catching their breath, as Chekov sat down with his brand new confidence and tried to beam Spock and the elders off of Vulcan. They stood there and watched him realize, just after he'd gotten his first taste of secondhand invincibility, that he was never going to have that feeling back again. Too shell-shocked to look away politely, they were the only ones who saw the way Chekov's face changed when Spock's mother was gone.  
  
"Well," Kirk says to Bones. "What do you want me to do? He told me he wants to stay. He's given this mission two years of his life, he at least deserves a chance to finish it."  
  
Bones grunts. "You're the one who's going to have make the call, Jim."  
  
"No shit."  
  
Bones looks up at him with that sudden sympathy that cuts Kirk in half. Kirk never knew his father, and Bones is hardly old enough to qualify, but Kirk's best approximation of how it feels to know that kind of heaviness coupled with security has been his relationship with his best friend.  
  
"You alright?" Bones asks, sounding like he doesn't expect a real response. Kirk shrugs.  
  
"Sometimes I think I'd feel better if it was my fault," he says. "I can't figure out why. Maybe the guilt would be easier to deal with than – whatever this other shit is."  
  
"Maybe you need some therapy, too," Bones says.  
  
"But you don't believe in that horse shit."  
  
"I'm talking good, old-fashioned electroshock, you troubled son of a bitch." Bones winks and throws his cards onto the table. "I'm spent. You want a sedative before I go?"  
  
"Keep asking me that every night, see if my answer ever changes."  
  
"Well, how about evacuating my fucking office if you're going to keep ignoring my advice?"  
  
"Advice." Kirk scoffs. He's not even sure what he means. He's gotten maybe three hours of sleep in the last two days. The cards on the table look like a language he used to be able to read, something that doesn't make sense now. He doesn't want to leave Bones' office, with the green desk lamp and the pictures of his smiling daughter. He hates his own gaping quarters, and wants a room like the one that Chekov had, an ensign's bunk with no windows and a sonic shower.  
  
"Jim, something's gotta give," Bones says, helping him up. It's a kindness, the way he guides Kirk out of sick bay, but Kirk suspects he also just wants the soppy mess of his captain away from his clean medical sanctuary.  
  
"Sure," Kirk says. "But I still don't see what difference medicated sleep is going to make."  
  
"It would be _some_ sleep, would be the difference."  
  
Kirk shrugs and waves Bones off, heading for his quarters. He thinks about stopping by Chekov's old room on the way, knowing that Sulu will be there, under those unwashed blankets, but he's too tired to make himself believe that being there would make any difference. Sam mourned their father for most of his childhood, and he was always telling Kirk that he didn't understand, since Kirk had never met the guy. When Sam died, Kirk's mother went someplace where Kirk couldn't follow. He should know by now that haunting around someone who's lost something that he's never known himself doesn't do anybody any good.  
  
When he reaches his stateroom, he stands around for awhile feeling like he's forgotten to do something important. To make himself feel better, he sends a message to Sulu's PADD, not sure if he's even touched the thing since Chekov died.  
  
 _Eval tomorrow. Don't forget. Try to act sane if you want to stay._  
  
*  
  
Sulu passes all of his evaluations, and Kirk realizes afterward that he didn't really expect him to, though he also didn't expect Sulu to leave. He doesn't know how to act when Sulu returns to the bridge, stony-faced at the conn and avoiding the new alpha shift navigator's eyes. Kirk selected Chekov's replacement personally, with more consideration placed on how Sulu would react to him than the guy's actual navigation skills. No one would have come close to Chekov in that department, anyway. The new navigator's name is Blanton and he's in his mid-forties, fat, kind of a dickweed. For this transitional period, Kirk basically just sought out the farthest thing from Chekov that he could find. Even the female candidates had more in common with his dead navigator than Blanton does.  
  
"So," Kirk says, setting his tray down across from Sulu's at lunch. "First day back."  
  
Sulu looks up from his tomato soup as if to say, _Fucking . . . really?_ , and Kirk grins, though he feels stabbed. He's afraid of Sulu lately. Anybody who's grieving has always made him ragged with nerves.  
  
"I don't know," Kirk says when Sulu just stares. "It's got to be weird." In the past, he's avoided this kind of thing, any sort of confrontation about the mourning in question, willing to take his cue and pretend that nothing was wrong until a full scale breakdown was in order, but that never really went well.  
  
"This is autopilot," Sulu says. "Okay?"  
  
"Okay. Sure. You want me to leave you alone?"  
  
"Do whatever you want, Captain."  
  
Kirk doesn't go. He eat his turkey sandwich and sneaks glances at Sulu as he spoons tomato soup into his mouth, fighting the urge to compliment him on voluntary eating.  
  
"So, next week," Kirk says. "The Pytharian system. I was thinking – there are a couple of key away missions, if you're interested. Some really interesting vegetation, I bet."  
  
Sulu laughs, his eyes on the film over his soup. When he looks up at Kirk, it's like taking a sword through the chest, but the accusation in his eyes isn't even as sharp as Kirk wants it to be.  
  
"Whatever you want, Captain," Sulu says. Getting called 'Captain' doesn't usually bother Kirk this much, but maybe he's thinking of the way Chekov used to say it. Maybe Sulu is, too. "Just – put me on all the away teams. You think I – give a fuck?" He laughs. "Sir?"  
  
"Sulu." Kirk doesn't know what to say. He's never been in love the way that Sulu was – who has? If he's honest, he's finding it kind of perverse, the fact that Sulu is still existing now that Chekov is gone, though it's admirable, too, the way that he was able to fool the ship's counselors into allowing him to stay.  
  
"Look." Sulu shakes his head. "I had two things. Him, and flying this ship. It's just a default, staying here. It's the only other thing I had. So, I. I don't care what happens now, and you should take that into account – I didn't give the therapist that impression, 'cause I don't want to leave. But, Captain, I respect you, and you should know: I don't give a fuck anymore about what happens to me, but I – I need something to – if I don't fly this ship I'll die."  
  
He stares at Kirk, not pleading with him, not even completely connected to what he's saying, if the dullness in his eyes means anything. Kirk wants to hide Sulu in a big coat, to let his pain incubate until it's something he can use to move forward. Right now, he's just uncanny, the raw, numb look in his eyes making Kirk uncomfortable. Kirk tugs at his collar and rubs his pickle through the mayonnaise that leaked from his sandwich.  
  
"Listen," Kirk says. "When it comes to flying this ship, I'm your biggest fan. You can stay as long as you can convince those therapists to keep you here."  
  
"See, Captain," Sulu says, smiling, looking sick. The bags under his eyes look like they weight fifty pounds each. "That's why I'm staying. Because you _know_ I'm fucked up forever, and you're still – you still want me here." He laughs down at his soup. "And, uh. Maybe I know why."  
  
"Don't," Kirk says sharply. He never should have told Sulu, or anyone, what happened with Sam. It's a weapon that can only be used against him. Sulu shrugs.  
  
"Hey," he says. "I'm kind of, uh. Uncensored, right now. If you can't handle it, maybe you should go sit with someone else."  
  
"Yeah," Kirk mutters, but no one else seems willing to brave the Lone Sulu table, and Kirk doesn't want to leave him to his own devices. He eats his mayonnaise-flavored pickle and narrows his eyes a little, because he thinks Sulu will appreciate it, in the state he's in. Sulu grins, unrecognizably.  
  
"It's like dying and still hanging around," Sulu says, his eyes locked hard on Kirk's. "That makes you strong, right? Because nothing matters anymore."  
  
"Sure." Kirk stares at Sulu, trying to catch something in his eyes that Kirk can hold on to. Sulu ducks it effortlessly, smiling with his privilege, the ruin that Kirk couldn't possibly understand.  
  
They sit in silence for awhile, Sulu with his tomato soup and Kirk with his turkey sandwich. Kirk feels thirteen years old again, floundering, and that's the selfish angle he's going to have to work or ignore, Chekov's death bringing it all back home.  
  
"What are your plans?" Kirk asks. "For after your shift?"  
  
Sulu snorts. He looks at Kirk like they know each other well, which wasn't really true before the last three weeks, and Kirk's mind goes to the place that made it so.  
  
"Right," Kirk says. "In Chekov's bed, in the dark. Okay." Maybe Sulu expected Kirk to try to talk him out of it. "Whatever. I was going to invite you to kick my ass at basketball."  
  
"Basketball?" Sulu stares at him, blinks. "You think I want to play basketball?"  
  
"No. I expected you to turn me down."  
  
Sulu actually holds his gaze for awhile, which is progress, or, anyway, Kirk wants to think that it is. When Sulu laughs darkly and looks down at his soup, Kirk wants to believe that this is progress, too. He's fixated in the sense that he wants to be suffering for Chekov like this, too, just like he wanted to suffer for his father the way Sam did, and like he wanted the same thing when Sam died, when even his own fathomless grief could never match his mother's.  
  
"Captain," Sulu says. "I barely know where I am. That's not true when I'm on the bridge, even though he's not there. That's why I need to stay here, where I can sometimes be on the bridge, and the rest of the time be in that bed. If you can understand that and allow it, great. If not, uh. I'll make myself so scarce you'll never hear from me again."  
  
"Will you wash the sheets at least?" Kirk says. "Eventually?"  
  
Sulu looks up at him with surprise, and Kirk wants to explain to him that he's specially equipped to deal with this, that he's been the only one who thought of the cleanliness of the sheets before.  
  
"Washing the sheets would defeat the whole purpose," Sulu says. He looks like he's surprised to be speaking this particular language with someone who will actually be able to translate.  
  
"I know," Kirk says. "That's why I'm asking. Eventually, will you? Or will you take, you know. The other road." He shrugs. Sulu doesn't seem to want to be coddled.  
  
"I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," Sulu says. He looks around the mess, and Kirk watches him, the way he looks at the others now. He's become another species, and everyone avoids him as politely as they can, asking him if he needs anything before hurrying away.  
  
"Well, I'll be here," Kirk says, "Either way." Because it's the only thing he's ever known to say. Sulu stirs his soup, far away from him now. They don't speak for the rest of the meal.  
  
Kirk plays basketball alone, the gym quiet around him, huge and empty except for the huff of his breath and the skitter-slap of the ball. He makes a couple of pretty good shots and wishes someone was around to witness them, but the gym is always empty at this hour, closed to anyone without special permission.  
  
Bones shows up eventually, when Kirk has worn himself out. Kirk is lying on his back on the floor, still breathing heavily, and he turns his head toward Bones when he appears to frown down at him. Kirk shrugs.  
  
"Goddammit, Jim," Kirk says, before Bones can. Bones doesn't appear to be amused.  
  
"I will bring a bio bed in here if I have to," he says. Kirk laughs, and sits up with a groan.  
  
"This is my workout, Bones," he says. "That was yoga."  
  
"Uh-huh. Dammit, Jim, don't make me drug you against your will. You need sleep. You don't look well."  
  
"Trying to appeal to my sense of vanity?" Kirk stands up, grabs the basketball and makes one last dramatic shot. It bounces off the rim.  
  
"You're pushing the limits of my patience, Jim," Bones says. "I do have the authority, as your CMO, to make executive decisions about your health if I determine that you're engaging in self-harming behaviors."  
  
"That's a little extreme, don't you think?"  
  
Bones stares at him for awhile, and Kirk begins to get the feeling this is serious. He looks over at the basketball, which is still rolling, and watches it until it bumps softly against the wall.  
  
"I mean," Kirk says, drunk with exhaustion. "I'm not even the one that this is happening to, right?"  
  
"This is about more than losing your officers, Jim. Something's going on, something else. You've been – pretty unhappy."  
  
"No, I haven't."  
  
"Dammit, Jim, don't act like a child!" Bones grunts and starts to walk away. Kirk follows him, swimming through the hard yellow light over the basketball court, feeling like he's being pulled on a string, a little toy with wheels.  
  
Bones won't speak to him, so he goes back to his quarters and takes a shower. His legs are like rubber, and he sits down in the tub, falling asleep with his head tipped back against the wall. He probably isn't out for long, but who can tell. He wakes himself up with a snore, turns the water off, dries quickly and slumps into bed. His bed has come to feel like a soul-swallowing enemy, so he drags his PADD in for company and types a message to Sulu.  
  
 _Hey, Lieutenant, I almost forgot to congratulate you on a really excellent first day back. If you're asleep right now you can disregard this, but if you're awake maybe you want someone to talk to?  
  
Also, question: I was accused of being unhappy this evening, do I come off that way?_  
  
He hits send because he wants to get rid of the words, not because he wants Sulu to read them. Two minutes later his PADD buzzes with a new message. He really doesn't think it's going to be a reply from Sulu, and checks the name in the _From_ field twice before he lets himself read the message.  
  
 _You come off like you really want everyone to think that you're happy. Which, yeah, gives most people the impression that you're not. Beyond that, I personally can't really tell._  
  
Kirk snorts, refusing to absorb that. He types up a reply quickly, afraid that he'll lose this little Sulu window, picturing him in the dark of that room, hiding under the blankets with his PADD.  
  
 _So you are awake. Hey, do you want some sedatives, to help you sleep? 'Cause Bones seems to have a surplus – he's constantly trying to shovel them down my throat._  
  
The next response comes less than a minute later. Kirk knows because he counts the seconds.  
  
 _I don't want to sleep._  
  
 _Why the heck not_  
  
 _Because waking up and remembering is like finding out all over again._  
  
Kirk doesn't know how to respond to that, and feels guilty for not having seen it coming. He decides to go with being a hypocrite.  
  
 _You can't just stop sleeping, Lieutenant_  
  
 _Sometimes I pass out_  
  
 _I can't have you flying when you're not rested enough to function_  
  
 _But I am. And plus. You're awake, too._  
  
Kirk laughs and thinks about going to Chekov's room. He could lie on his back on the floor and they could have this conversation in person, in the dark, without having to look at each other, just with less typing, plus the sound of each other's voices. But he knows Sulu doesn't want him there, in the Temple.  
  
 _I miss him_ , Kirk types. Dangerous, but true. _I know it doesn't compare with whatever you're feeling, but everything looks duller since he's gone. It's like the universe was promised something and that thing was taken away._  
  
When his brother died, Kirk wanted to take everything he saw in both hands, shake it, and ask how it had the nerve to exist when Sam was gone. Especially himself.  
  
Sulu's response takes a long time to come, and Kirk's heart pounds while he waits. He's afraid he's scared Sulu off, but ten minutes later he gets a long message.  
  
 _he used to do this thing before bed where he'd type a detailed account of what he wanted to dream about and then in the morning he would write about what he actually dreamed and how successful or not he was at manipulating his subconscious mind and he believed that dreams are the closest thing to heaven that actually exists like that's how good he was at this and how much faith he put in himself you know to just take on the whole universe with his bare hands but he did it in this fucking sweet way, this dream journal kind of way, he just took such good care of himself he never skipped a run and working hard like that made him so happy he would come back here with this big dumb smile and he loved the idea that he wasn't just a dweeby scientist but an athlete too though he wasn't much of one outside of running I mean I tried to teach him how to fence and he had no hand eye coordination. So anyway I've been reading his old dream journal, it goes all the way back to when he was five years old and I pretty much sob my fucking face off every time I look at it, not because it's touching (though it is) but because I both can't stop reading it and know that I'll eventually get to the end._  
  
Kirk reads this three times, his fingers shaking with the effort not to ask Sulu to tell him what five-year-old Pavel wanted to dream about. It takes him a long time to type his actual response.  
  
 _And what do you think heaven is?_  
  
It's a risky question, a delicate subject, but for some reason Kirk feels confident that it will actually comfort Sulu, that he's the type who believes that people go on somehow. Still, the minutes that pass as he waits for Sulu's response make him nervous.  
  
 _It's where he is. That was true while he was alive, too. Have you ever been in love_  
  
The lack of punctuation makes Kirk think it's not a real question, or that Sulu already knows the answer, the way Kirk knew that Sulu believes in heaven.  
  
 _Nope_  
  
 _It's like you can't even believe you have hands. Cause you get to touch this person. You can't believe you had hands all along and never realized what they were for, what they were capable of_  
  
Kirk is still trying to formulate his response when he gets another message from Sulu:  
  
 _sorry, I'm kinda stoned_  
  
Kirk laughs. It's a phenomenally good sign, the return of an appetite for self-destruction. At least it's some kind of appetite.  
  
 _Got enough for me?_ he sends, and then, quickly, because he's afraid Sulu will say _No, don't come_ :  
  
 _Just kidding_  
  
There's a pause that feels like literal silence between them, and Kirk supposes that it is, but for a moment the awkwardness makes him feel like they're in the same room.  
  
 _I wish I wanted to die, you know?_ Sulu sends. _Because that would be easier. But I can't kick the habit of wanting to live and wanting to have him here with me, living. It's like I want to **stop** dying, because that's what it feels like, every second_  
  
Kirk still can't come up with any real response outside of _Can I come there and sit with you_ , but he doesn't send that.  
  
 _Every time one of my crew dies, I wish it were me_ , he sends. _Do you believe that? Do you think I really mean it?_ He asks himself these questions pretty much every night.  
  
 _I think you would take a phaser blast for any of us_ , Sulu responds. _But maybe that's not really the same thing?_  
  
 _EXACTLY_ Kirk sends back, before he can reconsider the capslock. He laughs at himself, flushing with embarrassment in the dark, his aquarium gurgling in the next room, glowing through the open doorway. There's another pause before Sulu's next message, and Kirk realizes why when he reads it:  
  
 _If you ever want to get fucked up with me and talk about how to differentiate between intangible things, we could do that._  
  
Kirk is smiling pretty widely as he types out his response: _How stoned can you really be if you're spelling "differentiate" and "intangible" correctly, Lieutenant, come on_  
  
He waits for glorious recognition of his wit, and gets this instead:  
  
 _For some reason Pavel couldn't spell the word 'lieutenant.' He had some kind of mental block against it. He'd have to use the autocorrect on his PADD._  
  
This is kind of impossible to respond to, and Kirk wants to return to the discussion about getting fucked up together, guiltily.  
  
 _Well, he had a very impressive grip on Standard for a non-native speaker_ , Kirk sends, wincing.  
  
 _Not really. He was very stubborn, and he wouldn't give up particular phrasings, even though he knew they were wrong. Like "shrimps," he would always order "shrimps" instead of shrimp. He knew it was wrong and he thought it was cute or something, he was really vain about how cute he was sometimes. But then he'd turn around and be totally oblivious, and that was when he was painfully adorable and people would get nosebleeds, like this one time he came to the botany lab and I was showing some assistants this blathe root specimen I had, and when I gave it a dropper of fertilizer it made this little mouse-like noise and Pavel, who was there, irritating me actually, goes, 'oh, Hikaru! Did you hurt it?' and he wasn't being self-aware at all, and he had his hand over his mouth and his eyebrows were doing that arching thing, and everybody kind of died and I was proud because he was mine, I was the one who could touch the small of his back and tell him no, the plant was just fine_  
  
 _Everybody really loved him_ , Kirk sends. It's true, and Kirk wants to be able to enjoy these stories, but for some reason he isn't. Maybe they would be better told in person.  
  
 _I'm gonna go_ , Sulu sends.  
  
 _Get some sleep._  
  
 _Maybe._  
  
There's nothing for awhile, and Kirk isn't sure if he should send some sort of cheesy goodnight message, but as he's deciding not to, setting his PADD aside, a new message arrives.  
  
 _Please don't try to talk to me about all of this tomorrow._  
  
Kirk stares for awhile, feeling like he's just been clawed across the chest. He should know by now not to take other people's grief personally, but that's always what he's done best, seems like.  
  
 _You got it_ , he sends.  
  
*  
  
For awhile, all the good signs dry up, even the vague references to drug use. Sulu stops making references to anything that isn't directly work-related, and either skips his lunch break or goes to his room to eat. At night, he still retires to Chekov's old room, and almost every night Kirk has to fight the urge to send him PADD messages or stop by and knock on the door, but he avoids the temptation, disappointed with himself all night long but proud of himself in the morning, which matters more.  
  
Kirk starts having a lot of sex again, not enjoying it like he used to. He leans more toward men than women for awhile, then he fucks a Korean engineer with sturdy hands and switches back to women in a half-aware panic. The women have a tendency to rub their hands all over his back while they're getting fucked, which never irritated him before, but when he pins Ensign Roth's hands over her head that feels wrong, too.  
  
Jerking off is even worse. He can't believe how often he used to do it.  
  
Five months after Chekov, Jimenez and Harrison died, there's a biology-focused away mission to Crinthia-07, and Kirk suggests that Sulu should volunteer. He doesn't really expect him to take up the recommendation, and is surprised when he gets Sulu's official request. He removes Spock as the lead officer and reassigns the position to himself.  
  
"Captain," Spock says when he reaches the bridge that morning, and Kirk sits especially low in his chair, knowing what's coming. "Excuse me, but I noticed that I have been removed from the exobiological expedition to – "  
  
"Sorry about that, Spock," Kirk says, glad that Sulu isn't on the bridge yet. "I just think I should personally oversee this one."  
  
"May I ask why, sir?"  
  
"There are some – potential personnel complications," Kirk says. He's not looking at Spock, just staring straight ahead at the conn. Lieutenant Tifton is swiveling in the pilot's chair, checking the lift for his relief.  
  
"What sort of complications, sir?" Spock asks. The lift opens and Sulu walks forward, barely nodding at Tifton as he begins briefing Sulu on what happened during gamma shift. Kirk gives Spock a look, and Spock raises an eyebrow.  
  
"I believe I understand, Captain," he says.  
  
"I thought you might."  
  
The mission is nothing special, but it's the first one that Kirk has personally overseen in awhile. There are things he should be more concerned with on the ship, diplomatic intricacies and delicate circumstances that he probably shouldn't have left in the hands of Spock, but none of it holds the sort of life or death appeal that this does. Sulu's return to off-ship duty is like facing down a reckless alien king or clawing his way out of an icy grave on an inhospitable ice planet. It's the sort of thing he's thrown himself into face-first since the beginning of his service: potentially ruinous, full of impossibly treacherous complications, and apt to be considered a no-win situation. That's Sulu in general, since he lost Chekov, and Kirk is magnetized to this diagnosis, waist-deep in trying to disprove it.  
  
Exobiology has never interested him much. He sticks close to Sulu and nods a lot, encouraged by Sulu's stoic observations about plant life, because at least it's some type of verbal communication, a representation of Sulu's desire to continue on professionally if nothing else. The other two officers on the mission are Jacobs and Lyanthol, two women from sciences who seem a little too pleased to be away from the ship together, reminding Kirk of Sulu and Chekov when he first took them on away missions. They were like the kids in high school who seemed to know something that Kirk didn't, who recognized it in each other's eyes. Kirk fucked half the kids in his grade and still didn't get it, desperate to know.  
  
On the first night, they make two tents on a cliff that overlooks a valley full of the sentient Blarse plants that they're chiefly interested in studying. Jacobs and Lyanthol share a tent, and Kirk could possibly make a remark on their giggling, but he's never really been that kind of captain. He let Chekov laugh like that when he shared away mission tents with Sulu, and maybe that's why Sulu is sitting at the highest point of the cliff, his legs dangling over the edge. Kirk sits down beside him and sighs, trying to sound like a wise old man who can offer him pithy advice about how to get on with his life. Hearing himself, he realizes that he sounds more like an exhausted Labrador retriever.  
  
"Well," Kirk says when Sulu says nothing, offering no sign that he's even noticed Kirk sitting beside him. "All I got is something that might make you hate me."  
  
Sulu looks at him, and it's something, anyway, a real response to stimuli. Kirk hasn't seen much more for the past few months, aside from what's absolutely necessary on the bridge. Kirk shrugs, willing to be a jackass if it shakes Sulu out of this potentially permanent paralysis.  
  
"What?" Sulu says. In his grief he's achieved a kind of innocence that Kirk can only admire from afar. Sulu is twelve years old for all intents and purposes, only as angry as he is sad, his eyebrows arching softly.  
  
"This is all I got," Kirk says, holding up his hands. "And I don't blame you if you hate me for it. Okay, but – ever since we talked? I've been keeping a dream journal, you know. Like you told me about."  
  
He doesn't mention Chekov's name, because that would be out of bounds. All of this is really out of bounds, but Kirk has a theory that it's the only thing that will work: pissing Sulu off. Sulu's eyebrows knit slightly, which is a good sign.  
  
"And it's not really working," Kirk says. "But I didn't expect it to, so maybe that's the problem. Not that I don't have faith in the basic concept, it's just that I know I don't have that kind of power over my mind. You know, they used to call me 'genius-level' because of how I scored on tests, but they never outright called me a genius. There's a distinction, I guess." He looks over at Sulu, trying to figure out if he should keep talking or throw himself over the cliff. Sulu's face is frozen, eyebrows still arching. He looks surprised, but not horrified.  
  
"Well," Kirk says. "Have you ever tried it?"  
  
Sulu looks up at the planet's three moons. He seems so much younger than Kirk, more than four years. Kirk watches him, wondering how often Sulu thought this about Chekov: _so much younger, he's so, so much younger than me_. The overwhelming need to protect the other person stems from that, certainly.  
  
"Uh," Sulu says. "No, I never tried. It was kind of. His thing."  
  
"Right!" Kirk was willing to be crushed, or sacrificed, or so he thought, but this is still not what he wanted from this conversation, which was painstakingly planned. "I'm getting that. So, anyway. That's all I got."  
  
"All you got?" Sulu looks at him, and there's no forgiveness there, but he's not exactly chastising Kirk, either. He looks vaguely confused, like he was interrupted in the midst of living one life and asked to live another. Kirk knows something about that, not as much as some people, but maybe enough to fake his way through the rest.  
  
"All I got," Kirk says. He looks down into the valley, which is Earth-like in its dark dampness, its offering nothing-ness. "I mean. You know what I mean."  
  
"Captain."  
  
"Well, Lieutenant. Nobody else is going to throw themselves onto the flames."  
  
"The flames, sir?"  
  
"Don't pretend like you don't know that you're, you know. This fire that anyone who gets near you has to throw himself onto."  
  
Sulu laughs, which was the goal, maybe, but he still sounds far away.  
  
"You're drunk, sir?"  
  
"No. I'm on duty. And I've been sleeping, lately, so I can't blame insomnia. Are you sleeping, Lieutenant?"  
  
"Sometimes." Sulu reaches over to put his palm against Kirk's forehead.  
  
And that's when Kirk knows. He thinks of a movie he saw as a kid, an ancient artifact touching another ancient artifact, a cave lighting up with blinding light, natives screaming with recognition.  
  
"You don't feel feverish." Sulu takes his hand away. "For a minute there I thought you'd been exposed to some pollen."  
  
"No," Kirk says, slowly, coming halfway back to life. "If I'd been affected by pollen – you know. I'd be humping your leg or something."  
  
"Right. So, your dream diary." Sulu looks like he wishes he could get angry about this flippancy, or like he wishes he could even consider it to be flippancy, but he's too tired to do either.  
  
"I don't know," Kirk says. "Mostly I want you to tell me what he wrote."  
  
"Oh." Sulu looks down at his hands, and only then does Kirk see that he's holding a little flower, one of the wispy things that grows in the grasses here. It's got dusty white petals and only the faintest scent, like old-fashioned laundry detergent.  
  
"But you don't have to," Kirk says hurriedly.  
  
"I know."  
  
"Well. I know you know."  
  
Sulu smirks, twirling the flower between his thumb and forefinger. Behind them, Lyanthol – or maybe Jacobs – lets out a peel of laughter, muffled by the walls of their tent.  
  
"When he was a kid he wanted to dream about getting candy," Sulu says. "Because his parents wouldn't let him eat it. He drew pictures of it in the margins, lollipops and stuff. If it worked he would write these triumphant tracts about how he'd outsmarted his parents." Sulu laughs and throws the little flower over the cliff, down into the dark. "Well, whatever. Real people should be warned against falling in love with people who could never last."  
  
"No, he was supposed to last," Kirk says lightly, and he does feel kind of drunk. It's possible there's a property to these grasses that has not been identified. It would account for Lyanthol and Jacobs' somewhat reckless coupling in the tent behind them.  
  
"Then when he was a teenager," Sulu says, ignoring Kirk. "He would write about these crazy sex fantasies. Like he gets locked in the school with his physics teacher after doing extra credit, or the track team gets gassed by anti-inhibition potion and they have an orgy in the locker room. He was really creative, in a kind of frightening way, and, uh. Well, reading this, in hindsight, kind of illuminated some things. Captain, are you sure we're not drunk?"  
  
"We're something," Kirk says. "But I don't think it's bad."  
  
"Oh. Well, later it was all about academic glory, and sometimes that coupled with sex fantasies, and sometimes both of those in combination with candy. But he was such an innocent, you know, I think that's the definition of an innocent, someone whose most indulgent, debase fantasies you can examine and find this sort of – straight line from basic desire into creative expressions of such."  
  
Sulu leans back to lie on the grass and looks up at Kirk, who is thinking about calling in an emergency team, about ninety percent sure they're all compromised. He lies down on the grass beside Sulu and lets out his breath, staring up at the stars.  
  
“What about after he met you?” Kirk says. “I mean, at the beginning.”  
  
“After he met me,” Sulu says. He's looking up at the stars like he's reading his answer there. “At first it was mostly about saving Spock's mother. He wanted to stop having nightmares about not doing it. He was angry with his subconscious, making demands, and it wasn't working. So he switched back to sex dreams for awhile. Weird stuff about orgies on the bridge. And then, eventually, me.”  
  
“You.”  
  
“Yeah, he'd start asking himself to dream about kissing me. Telling me things, confessing. I'm sure he never wanted me to see that part of the journal – probably any of it, but especially that part. We could have lived together forever and he never would have wanted me to know.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“'Cause – you know. You can be in the most intimate relationship of your life and you still withhold some things.”  
  
“Actually, I wouldn't know.” Kirk lifts his communicator to call for help, but maybe this is not so much an emergency as an inconvenience, or a supreme convenience, if he looks at it another way. He didn't intend to drug Sulu in order to get him to open up, but it's a bold move that he should have considered.  
  
“Take this for example,” Sulu says, lifting a hand. “Maybe you've never had a romantic relationship like this, fine, but Bones, your best friend. Does he know everything about you?”  
  
Kirk snorts, though he doesn't have a particular answer in mind. Then, no, of course not: Bones doesn't know that one very important thing that only Sulu knows, because of the last time they sat at the edge of something together during an away mission. He doesn't know that Kirk had a brother.  
  
“Are they still making you go to counseling?” Kirk asks.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
A huge gust of wind comes and blows through the grass, sending a thousand tiny flower petals hurtling over the cliff, twisting into the air like a god's sneeze.  
  
“Bless you!” Kirk shouts, his wooziness peaking and then spiraling away quickly, down into the dark with the flowers.  
  
“Me?” Sulu says.  
  
“No,” Kirk says. “Never mind. Bad joke.”  
  
Lyanthol sticks her head out of the tent and Sulu and Kirk arch their backs to look at her. She's got her hair down, long black ropes that fall around her bare shoulders.  
  
“Everything alright out here, Captain?” she asks.  
  
“Sort of,” Kirk says.  
  
When they get back to the ship they analyze the grass along with the other samples taken from the planet's surface. Kirk takes a personal interest and stands over Sulu's shoulder in the botany lab, watching him work. Sulu is stone-faced again, the set of his shoulders asking Kirk not to talk to him about any of this. Kirk obeys, wearing a science officer scowl as Sulu isolates the mild strain of blax-908 in the flowers' genetic structure.  
  
“For a human, inhaling a moderate amount of the pollen is like drinking three glasses of wine, basically,” he says as he makes his notes. Kirk laughs.  
  
“Lyanthol and Jacobs must have been snorting the stuff, then.”  
  
“All they did was have sex,” Sulu says a little sharply. “It's –” He stops himself before saying _It's not like you never got laid on an away mission_.  
  
“Just a joke, Lieutenant,” Kirk says, slapping Sulu's shoulder. Sulu flinches and leans over his samples. Kirk gets the hell out of there.


	2. Chapter 2

Work is hectic for awhile, personnel issues on the ship and complications on away missions. Kirk lets himself be lost to it as much as possible, but it's not as easy as it was before. Sulu is always at the corner of his eye, especially when he's out of sight. Kirk is always looking for him.   
  
Six months after Ensign Chekov was obliterated by the transporter, Kirk gets a request from Engineering: Ensign York has been begging for his own room since the first month of the mission. He has chronic night terrors and is embarrassed after having driven three roommates away. He's a good crewman and his direct superiors tell Kirk that he deserves this peace of mind. Kirk recommends him for a psychological evaluation.   
  
“The root of the problem is the night terrors,” he explains to Bones at lunch, feeling guilty. “I mean – modern psychology should be able to solve something that simple, right?”  
  
“Right,” Bones says. “Like it should be able to cure insomnia.”   
  
“I told you, I'm sleeping a lot better now. Don't I look better?”  
  
“Sure, Jim, you look fantastic.” Bones has his face in his tray, and when Kirk says nothing he looks up with a sigh. “Listen,” he barks. “I got my own problems lately.”   
  
“Oh, sorry. I, uh – how are _you_ , Bones?”  
  
Bones rolls his eyes and throws his fork down. He has been looking a little tired himself, but Kirk just figured he was overworked as usual.   
  
“Forget it,” Bones says. “Just don't try to sell me on the fact that you're cured. You won't give up Ensign Chekov's room to some hardworking, emotionally disturbed little engineer? Why the hell not?”  
  
“Because – because –”  
  
“Because Lieutenant Sulu sleeps there. Right. Last time I checked, he's got his own spacious, lieutenant-sized quarters. Why don't you give that to Ensign York, if Sulu is so attached to Chekov's old bed?”   
  
“You're being really insensitive, Bones,” Kirk says, shaking a spoon at him. “It's only been six months. They were together for two years. Two years! Can you imagine the time it takes to get over something like that?”   
  
“I was married for eleven years, Jim. I think I can imagine.”   
  
“Right, well. That's – different.” He really has no real reason not to take one of the two rooms Sulu uses away from him, except that he doesn't want to have that conversation with Sulu, who keeps his own quarters clean and neat, according to the sanitation computers. He goes there to shower and dress and eat most of his meals, and to send transmissions to his sisters that Kirk has been fighting the urge to override and read, as is his right as Captain, technically. Meanwhile, the sanitation computers have marked Chekov's old room in emergency red. Kirk doesn't even want to think about the condition of the bedsheets, or anything else in there, Sulu included. But he can't seem to stop thinking about Sulu's condition, despite his steely competence on the bridge.   
  
He's told himself many times that what he experienced on the cliff, when Sulu touched his forehead, was only an effect of the flowers. Three glasses of wine can account for a lot of dangerous malarkey. Still, he's taken to monitoring the outgoing transmissions when he can't sleep, and whenever he sees one from H. Sulu to Meiko Sulu in San Francisco, United States of America, Earth, he sits up a little in bed and flexes his hands, then touches one of his palms to his forehead, trying to unlock that feeling again.   
  
“I need to get laid,” he decides, stirring his soup.   
  
“Do whatever you have to,” Bones says. “Just give that poor ensign his own room.”   
  
Kirk sends a transmission to Sulu that night, feeling eleven years old again, in the family room in Iowa with a crush on one of Sam's drug-addled friends. Kirk would try to be doing something cool whenever they walked through the living room after selling Sam something, but they never noticed, just sucked their breath in hard through their noses and slammed out the front door. Kirk would watch them go from the window, imagining the intricacies of their routines, the long hours sitting staring at nothing, sometimes passing out and coming to on the side of the road, halfway across town. It was glamorous, that kind of self-contained misery.   
  
His transmission asks Sulu for a meeting, first thing in the morning, two hours before shift. He figures the timing is good: Sulu will be showered and ready for work, in a determined mood if nothing else. Sulu shows up to conference room E-5 with his hair still damp and his face set, unreadable. He sits down across from Kirk at the conference table, and everything about his posture suggests that he's not going to change anytime soon, that he's not even going to change those dirty sheets.  
  
“Listen,” Kirk says, rubbing at his eyes. “For the past couple of months the standards people have been bugging me about the sanitation sensor readings in, you know. Chekov's room.”   
  
He checks Sulu for a reaction. Sulu's hands are folded on the table, and Kirk jumps in his seat when he sees that they're covered with cuts and scrapes, some scars hardening on his knuckles.  
  
“Um,” he says, staring, and Sulu pulls his hands into his lap.   
  
“If you have to clean out that room, I can't stop you,” Sulu says, and Kirk knew he would do this, that he would make Kirk be the bad guy, as if he's got a personal vendetta against Chekov's memory.   
  
“I, um,” Kirk says. “What happened to your hands?”  
  
“I got into a fight. It's nothing.”  
  
“When?”  
  
“On the space station.”   
  
Kirk has been so busy that he completely missed the fact that Sulu took a shore leave for the first time since Chekov died. Apparently it didn't go well, but at least it's a sign of life.  
  
“Do you want to see Bones about –”  
  
“No.”   
  
“Ah. Okay. Um, so. Sulu, I don't really care about the room. I care about your – health.”  
  
Sulu stares at him, offering nothing. Kirk fidgets. Sulu's gaze burns hard enough to make Kirk's cheeks feel hot, and his shampoo scent makes him seem alarmingly human, even in the sanitized buzz of the conference room's overhead lighting.   
  
“So what'd the guy do?” Kirk asks.  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“The guy you hit.”   
  
Sulu touches his eyebrow and looks away, like Kirk is an insect he'd like to swat. Kirk wants to hold Sulu's hands inside both of his, one at a time, and kiss all the rough places.  
  
“Nothing,” Sulu says. “I overreacted.”   
  
“Oh, really? But you managed not to get arrested and embarrass me. Good job.” He's trying to sound sarcastic, and worries that he actually sounds congratulatory. Sulu looks down at his hands, picking idly at a fingernail.   
  
“I'm waiting to go crazy, I think,” Sulu says. “'Cause it would be a relief. But it's not happening.”   
  
Kirk's mother actively tried to go crazy when Sam died, with the sleeping outside and the doing the left behind drugs Sam couldn't quite stuff down before he overdosed. She couldn't do it, though, couldn't forget why she was trying to become an authentic lunatic.   
  
“What do you need?” Kirk asks, putting his own hands on the table. “If you need to keep those rooms, I'm going to let you. If you need to sleep in those sheets until they're black and dissentigrating, I'm not going to stop you. Fuck, if you need to hit _me_ in the face, I'll let you. But you can't just sit around not – asking for anything. It makes everybody nervous.”   
  
Sulu shakes his head, then rolls his neck around on his shoulders, scratches at his arm. He's avoiding Kirk's eyes.   
  
“I need to be left alone,” he says.   
  
“Well, fine. Then I need that room.”   
  
“Then take it!” Sulu says, standing. “Are we done here?”  
  
“Hikaru!”  
  
“What? What the fuck do _you_ need, Captain?”  
  
Kirk opens his mouth to inform Sulu that he just earned himself some disciplinary action, but it's too petty to actually say, so he just sits there with his mouth hanging open until Sulu storms out of the room.  
  
*  
  
Kirk is drinking alone in his room later that night, looking at pictures from last year on his PADD, when Sulu shows up at the door. He's fucked up, too, on something that isn't alcohol, his pupils fat with it. Kirk has been monitoring his replicator usage and hasn't seen anything out of the ordinary that could indicate a drug problem, which means he's been getting whatever he's using illegally. It's a problem on every starship, especially on long voyages like this one, and Kirk is sure there are plenty of sympathetic dealers who are more than willing to supply Sulu with a self-prescribed pleasant haze.  
  
“Hey, Captain,” Sulu says, slurring. “I left my room.”  
  
“I see that.”   
  
“His room, I mean.”  
  
“I knew what you meant. Get in here.”   
  
Sulu walks in, rubbing at his eyebrows in a worrying way. He'll disturb the order of one with two fingers, smooth it out, then mess it up again. He walks over to the aquarium, and the way he's swaying on his feet makes Kirk nervous for his fish.  
  
“So I'm like five shots of whiskey into the evening,” Kirk says. “If you want to tell me what you're on.”   
  
“I keep listening to this old song from Earth, from a million years ago,” Sulu says. “'Ghost of you, my lost romance!' Stuff like that. That's what I'm on.”   
  
“Sounds serious.” Kirk walks over and puts his hands on Sulu's shoulders, slowly guiding him away from the aquarium and into a chair at the table where Kirk used to hold poker games once a week. “Why don't I replicate you something to eat? What do you want?”  
  
“What do I _want_?” Sulu says with a scoff, shouting. He punches the table and glares at Kirk. “I want my fucking Pavel back. You think I care about anything else? You think I _want_ anything else?”  
  
Kirk presses his lips together and sits down across from Sulu, directly in the path of his blazing hatred. He absorbs it like radiation, feels it seeping irretrievably into his blood. Sulu won't even remember this conversation, his eyes halfway shut like he's going to fall face first into the table any second, but Kirk will glow in the dark forever from being exposed to this, the thing that Sulu has to direct somewhere, the meltdown he can't not have.   
  
“Tell me,” Kirk says. “Go ahead.”  
  
“It's your fucking fault!” Sulu says. He grabs the edge of the table like he wants to flip it, then sobs, looking away, a child who just realized he's lost in the middle of a crowded space station. “You shouldn't have sent him. You should have – known, you should have taken the bullet, you should have disappeared.”  
  
He's talking to himself now, and Kirk is pretty sure they've had this conversation before. He studies Sulu, thinking of his personnel file, the sisters and the junior achievements, summer on the old moon colony, tradition and family like a lake that might as well have been an ocean, the other shore invisible. He was promised something and it's gone away. That's never happened to him before, but anyone who loses something knows this feeling, except the people like Kirk who were born right into the neverending shitstorm of loss. Kirk has never known what it's like to trust the universe to keep the things that matter close enough to touch.   
  
“You just – you don't understand,” Sulu says, reaching across the table and grabbing Kirk's wrists with junkie strength. Kirk is probably going to have to discharge him, and it's going to hurt worse than losing both hands.   
  
“You don't understand what he was _like_ ,” Sulu says, narrowing his eyes. “He was – the taste of his skin, it was every color all at once, only better, and – the way he would – his arms, the way they fit around my shoulders? And my name – my name wasn't even a _thing_ until he said it. It didn't mean anything, before.”   
  
“I know,” Kirk says, because it's the easiest thing to say when you don't.  
  
“You don't just – go on after losing something like that,” Sulu says. He's squeezing Kirk's wrists so hard that they hurt, and Kirk is aware of his pulse, thudding under Sulu's thumbs.   
  
“So what do you want to do, Hikaru?” Kirk asks. “You want to die?” Not the right question, but the only one that's really fair. Hikaru blinks several times, his grip on Kirk's wrists loosening.   
  
“'Cause that's the only other option,” Kirk says when he seems to actually have Sulu's attention. “Go on without him and suffer every day, drag yourself through the minutes under the weight of those memories, or die. You know that's the only other option, right?”  
  
“I am dying,” Sulu says. “This is death.”  
  
“No, it's not. You just wish dying was this hard, because you think it's what you deserve. It's actually much easier than this, right, Hikaru? That's why you won't let yourself do it.”  
  
Kirk is mostly talking out his ass, drunk. He flips his hands over slowly and holds Hikaru's, wanting to rub his thumbs over every little knick and scar, or to lick them, to hold Hikaru's hands in his mouth one finger at a time. Here is the love he will never, ever have, like the thing he couldn't win from his ruined mother, and the thing Sam told him about, the thing Sam had before their father was gone. Kirk won't even have the love Bones gets from his daughter, a fragile, faraway thing like a ribbon tied to the tail of a comet, because he wouldn't know how to be a father, and because he's pretty sure he's never going to have sex with a woman again. It would be too cruel to even run his fingers through a woman's hair, or a man's, all the time thinking: _this is not Hikaru Sulu, this is not him at all_.  
  
Sulu puts his head in his hands and touches his eyebrows for awhile. Kirk lets him do it, watching him in the glow from the aquarium, which makes his hair look bluish.   
  
“I'll help you clean up that room,” Kirk says. “Whichever one you want to give up. But if you give up the clean room, the one where you go to get sober, I'll have to kick you off the ship. You've known that, Hikaru. You're waiting for me to do it, but you're giving me too much credit. I'm not letting you push the decision onto me.”  
  
“Fucking shut up for a minute,” Sulu says, but it's soft and kind and Kirk feels immeasurably encouraged.   
  
Kirk makes Sulu a bowl of noodles with dried mushrooms and scallions. He thinks about calling Bones to get a read on what Sulu has been taking, then decides he doesn't trust Bones with this. Which is not to say that he doesn't trust Bones to help Sulu, but that he doesn't trust Bones to do so in a way that will first and foremost allow Kirk to stay close to him.   
  
They sit on the lavish sofa in Kirk's main entertaining chamber and stare at the sixty-inch data screen, which is playing a musical from Jarvish-8, a tragic love story. The language is beautiful but incomprehensible to Kirk, and at this point all language is incomprehensible to Sulu, who is slumped over onto his side, his eyes just barely slitted as he looks at the screen.   
  
“Are you still writing about what you want to dream?” Sulu asks, murmuring low, but Kirk translates this easily.   
  
“No,” Kirk says. “I'm not very good at leading my mind around like that. I wish I was.”   
  
“Yeah,” Sulu says. “I dream about him a lot. I'm always looking for him, but I can never find him. He's always, like, in the next room. It's like he doesn't want me to find him.”  
  
“I'm sure he would,” Kirk says. “If it were up to him. It's just your anxiety about losing him, it's following you into your dreams.”   
  
“I don't know,” Sulu says. “I think maybe he's mad at me.”   
  
“For what?”   
  
Sulu doesn't answer, and Kirk looks over to see that he's fallen asleep, his arms wrapped around one of the sofa's fat pillows. His mouth and nose are hidden behind the pillow, and his eyes are pinched even in his sleep, his forehead wrinkled.   
  
Kirk wants badly to touch Sulu's ankle, which is resting on the couch, not far from his hand, Sulu's leg stretched out toward Kirk. He's wearing his boots and probably wouldn't even feel it, but Kirk won't let himself do it. The room is dark and eerie with the light from the aquarium and the screen, and he imagines Chekov standing in a shadowy corner, seeing Kirk's hand moving toward Sulu's body and saying, firmly: _No_.  
  
*  
  
Sulu wakes up looking like hell and Kirk doesn't say anything about his hangover. He puts the fake sunlight program on and windows appear on the walls of his quarters, alive with an eight o'clock in the morning glow that looks real. Sulu sits up and stares at the floor, not bothering to fix his hair, which is poking up at odd angles. He takes a glass of water and an aspirin when Kirk hands them to him.  
  
“Cereal?” Kirk says, standing in front of Sulu and watching him drink the aspirin down. “Are you a cereal man?”   
  
“How'd you know?” Sulu asks. He sounds like he swallowed a few nails last night, along with whatever poison he put in his system.   
  
“I could just tell,” Kirk says, taking the glass back. How he knew is that Sulu grew up in the happy suburbs where cereal boxes were read at the table, siblings crunching flakes on both sides of little Hikaru with his bed hair and drowsy eyes, mom at the sink. Kirk goes to the replicator and comes back with cinnamon rings in milk, orange juice and a banana. Sulu snorts and stares at the tray, not meeting Kirk's eyes.  
  
“What, I'm an invalid?” he says.   
  
“You're right,” Kirk says. “What's a little drug problem? Sorry for this gross overreaction. I should have just thrown you in the brig and written you up for your pre-dismissal evaluation.”   
  
Sulu stares up at him, looking deadly, still not taking the tray.   
  
“I'd ask how fucked up I was last night, but it must have pretty bad if I ended up here,” he says.  
  
“Right.” Kirk shoves the tray into his hands. “Eat. And don't give me any shit. I'm hungover, too.”   
  
Kirk has his usual protein bar and coffee, and they watch highlights from the chocoby races on TX'yl9, a planet they're orbiting, one that Kirk will have to visit for a dry as shit diplomatic meeting later today. He tries not to feel cozy with Sulu crunching cereal beside him, that bed hair, the smell of coffee and the low drone of the announcers on the screen.   
  
“Fine,” Sulu says when the bowl is empty, sitting in his lap, the spoon in a puddle of milk. “I know I can't – stay here and keep doing this – this shit I've been doing. But I need to stay here. So I'll stop.”   
  
Kirk says nothing. He gets up and refills his coffee, and when he comes back, Sulu is giving him a pleading look. Kirk tries not to let it get to him, but this is the only kind of pleading Sulu will ever do for him, asking to stay here in the sacred place where he was once allowed to touch Chekov.   
  
“Relax,” Kirk says, sitting down beside him again, a little closer this time. “You deserve a second chance. Just don't make me give you a third. 'Cause. You know I fucking would. Be a pal and don't humiliate me like that, alright?”  
  
Sulu plays with his spoon, letting it clink against the edge of the bowl. Kirk wishes he would burst into tears or do something similarly finite, but he knows it doesn't work that way. There's just a lot of angry staring into space and long stretches of silence.   
  
“He would hate me like this,” Sulu says. “He'd think it was weak and pointless, and he'd –” Sulu sniffs out a laugh and finally looks at Kirk. “He'd tell me to give you a fucking break.”  
  
“Maybe.” Kirk thinks Chekov would understand, that his ghost, if he were allowed to have one, would be clutching at Sulu's arm now, petting him, telling to take as much time as he needs to fall apart.   
  
Sulu stands up with a groan and stretches, his shirt riding up as he arches his back. He looks like he's been run over by a hover bike at least twice. Kirk wants to kiss him everywhere.   
  
“I'm gonna go take a shower and everything,” Sulu says. He hands Kirk the cereal bowl like it's some heirloom and not just a replicated piece of nothing that can be tossed into the dissentigrator. “Thanks.”   
  
“I want you back here after your shift,” Kirk says, hating himself. Sulu's eyes go a little wider. “I mean it, Lieutenant. I'm going to personally oversee your recovery from – whatever it is you're on.”  
  
Sulu opens his mouth, maybe to protest, but then he just nods, probably imagining Chekov at his side, telling him to give Kirk a break, because he could never stoop to crediting himself with the idea that Kirk might deserve one.  
  
*  
  
The diplomatic mission is as dry as Kirk predicted, which should be a relief, considering some of the ones that have gone awry in the past, but he was in the mood for a distraction, something that would keep him from obsessing over the idea that Sulu will be spending the evening in his quarters, suffering from withdrawal or even just sitting there, fuming in his quiet way. Spock is giving Kirk a look as they're taken back to the ship in the planet's royal carriage, and Kirk pretends not to notice.  
  
“Captain –”  
  
“I'm fine, Spock.”   
  
“You have been – quiet lately, sir. I am still unable to discern all the subtleties of human emotion, as Nyota often reminds me. Are you dissatisfied with my performance today, sir?”  
  
“No, Spock,” Kirk says. “I'm dissatisfied with myself, actually.” He does this thing where he keeps the conversations that would benefit from Bones' input as far away from his best friend as he can, having them instead with Spock, who will more often tell Kirk what he wants to hear: be logical, avoid emotional responses, don't attach meaning to matters that are ultimately trifling.   
  
“Dissatisfied with yourself?” Spock says. “Captain, I believe that your performance today with the diplomats was quite satisfactory, we were very well-received and I – ”  
  
“I don't mean on the mission,” Kirk says, snapping a little, which is also something he can get away with when he's talking to Spock, who doesn't take it personally. “I mean in general.”   
  
“Captain, your performance in general certainly meets every standard –”  
  
“Just – forget it, Spock. It's a personal thing.”   
  
“One of your personal relationships is troubling you, sir? Are you speaking about the doctor? I have noticed that he has been spending a perhaps inadvisable amount of time with one of his –”  
  
“No, it's not Bones!” Kirk also has this thing where he refuses to let Spock finish a sentence, ever. It's like a game they play. “It's – wait, what were you going to say? Bones is spending an inadvisable amount of time with who?”  
  
“This is of course only my personal evaluation of the situation,” Spock says, sitting up a little straighter. He's competitive with Bones when it comes to Kirk's friendship, something that would be charming if the sound of the two of them sniping at each other didn't give Kirk a headache.   
  
“Dr. McCoy has been often in the company of Nurse Chapel during the past months,” Spock says. “And as you know, unless the circumstances are extenuating, it is against Starfleet policy to establish interpersonal relationships with immediate coworkers if those relationships could possibly compromise –”  
  
“Oh, sure, unless there are extenuating circumstances – like, say, a Commander dating the head communications officer. Extenuating circumstances like those?”  
  
“Captain, you are being facetious.” Spock's mouth tightens a little, and Kirk laughs. “I am aware that my relationship with Nyota goes against the recommended policy, but that policy is, after all, only recommended, not required, and because I am a half-Vulcan – ”  
  
“Right, right, you're capable of maintaining a healthy working relationship with someone who you're also sharing a bed with. Got it. So how exactly are Dr. McCoy and Nurse Chapel different, aside from the fact that neither of them is, to my knowledge, half-Vulcan?”  
  
“Sir, I believe that due to the doctor's somewhat delicate emotional state regarding his divorce and taking into account Nurse Chapel's age, which, if I am not mistaken, is only nineteen years, the stage could potentially be set for an unpleasant atmosphere in one of the most critical departments on the _Enterprise_ , and as I believe that Dr. McCoy and Nurse Chapel are the most qualified Starfleet personnel available in those positions –”  
  
“Look, I'll talk to Bones,” Kirk says, patting Spock's knee. He is kind of disturbed by this, because he hasn't heard a word about it from Bones, and because Spock's logic is sound. Bones is a wreck when it comes to women, and Chapel is a doe-eyed teenager. A genius, maybe, Chekov-style, but still a teenage girl who can't really be capable of handling the sopping mess that is Bones-in-love. Kirk saw him through some pretty damaging relationships at the Academy, when the divorce was fresh, and he doesn't want to relive that, even though he does feel immeasurably cheered by the idea of thinking about someone else's problems for awhile.   
  
Still, he has Sulu to look after in a more immediate sense, and he goes straight to his quarters when they return to the ship, resisting the temptation to drop by Bones' office and rant at him for being secretive. Kirk straightens the place up and puts on a little music, telling himself that he's just trying to make the atmosphere more lively. He turns the fake windows on 'prairie sunset,' because it's calming, and pours himself a glass of whiskey, because he's freaking out. When he hears the chime on his door he spills the whiskey on his shirt in a panic, then shuts off the windows and the music, deciding it's all wrong.   
  
He's not pathetic enough to consider this some kind of fucking date.  
  
Sulu arrives looking embarrassed, and Kirk quickly understands why. Sulu is shaking, sweat gathered at his temples, his cheeks looking hollow. Kirk dials up a virtual reality game on his data screen and distracts him with that for awhile, but Sulu just keeps losing, cursing and dropping his controller.   
  
“Want me to bore you with the details of my mission today?” Kirk asks when Sulu is lying on the floor, twitching slightly and staring up at the ceiling. Kirk is sitting beside him, beginning to panic. “Or should I just call Bones?”   
  
“No,” Sulu says sharply. “Don't call Bones. Just – just. I'm fine. I knew this was coming. I just have to b-be here. And ride it out.”  
  
“Well, I'm putting you on sick leave tomorrow, obviously,” Kirk says, already plotting. Chicken soup? Soap operas from Maxlon-4 on the data screen? Sulu winces as if he's reading Kirk's thoughts.   
  
“I'll be better by then,” he says. “In the meantime, yeah. Tell me about your mission, tell me anything. Give me something to think about other than this rat that's eating my stomach from the inside out.”  
  
“God, Sulu, are you sure –”  
  
“Captain, I've done this before,” Sulu snaps, glaring at him, and the viciousness drains from his features, softening into regret. Kirk's eyebrows shoot up.  
  
“Oh, really?”  
  
“That's a story for another time,” Sulu says, wincing again. “Please – please. Tell me some really dull story about Spock.”   
  
Kirk pretends not to be hurt by that. He's always thought his Spock stories were pretty funny. His mind is whirling, trying to settle on a theory about when Sulu would have been secretly addicted to illicit substances.  
  
“Um,” Kirk says. “Well, okay, here you go: Spock thinks Bones is giving it to Nurse Chapel and he's deemed it inappropriate.”  
  
Sulu snorts and closes his eyes, looking calm for a moment, as if this gossip is good medicine.   
  
“Spock should talk,” Sulu says.  
  
“No kidding, right? But I'm kind of cheesed at Bones for keeping this from me. Though maybe he was trying to tell me the other day. I've been a little preoccupied.”   
  
“Yeah? With what?”  
  
Kirk laughs, then he realizes that Sulu is serious.  
  
“Uh,” he says. “Work. Captain stuff. You know.”   
  
Sulu smiles, his eyes still closed, and Kirk takes the opportunity to remind himself that he will never kiss that little smile, those fluttering eyelids. He's still in a place where he feels kind of glad about this, protected from something sharp that would almost certainly be run through his chest sooner or later.  
  
“What do you need?” Kirk asks. “Water? Food?”  
  
“Nothing,” Sulu says. “Just keep talking. Tell me, I don't know. How did you and Bones become friends?”  
  
So Kirk tells him, about the shuttle, Bones saying he might throw up, immediately talking about his ex-wife, drinking heavily. He seemed like Kirk's kind of guy, so they roomed together, and looked out for each other.   
  
“Bones saved the world by bringing me aboard the _Enterprise_ ,” Kirk says, and Sulu laughs.   
  
“No,” he says. “I saved the world by fucking up the external initial dampener protocol. That's what Pavel always told me. He said there was grace in human error.”   
  
“Grace in human error and heaven in your dreams,” Kirk says. “Must have been nice.”  
  
It's such a wrong thing to say that his tongue hurts. He looks over at Sulu, who seems unperturbed. His sweat has soaked through the armpits of the t-shirt he's wearing, and his collar is wet, too. For a long time neither of them says anything, and Kirk wonders if he should apologize.   
  
“It's easy to feel like you've got everything figured out when you're twenty,” Sulu says. “Didn't you feel that way, then?”  
  
Kirk thinks of being twenty. He was an unemployed drunk, addicted to anonymous sex, hanging around his brother's gravestone and occupying the empty old house while his mother was in space. The next five years of his life weren't much different, and the previous five hadn't been, either.   
  
“I didn't have it all figured out at twenty,” Kirk says. “But, hey. I wasn't a genius.”  
  
“You have some genius qualities, though,” Sulu says, then he frowns like he's not sure where that came from. “But. When I was twenty, that's when I was first getting really good at flying. I felt like I had unlocked every secret the universe held. Ha.”   
  
“You should feel like that when you figure out what to do with your life,” Kirk says. “That's how I felt when they gave me my five-year mission, when I selected my crew.”   
  
“I was so in love with Pavel that day,” Sulu says. “That day when we got our assignments? He wanted to see more of California, right, and we had all this free time before our orders came down, so I took him across the bridge and we went to some little winery that I thought would be romantic, and it was, but the guy who gave us the tour was getting all moony about making wine and I could almost hear Pavel chewing his tongue, trying not to say it was all absurd, that vodka was the perfect alcohol and this flavor business was overrated.”  
  
“Here, here,” Kirk says, though he never liked that about Chekov, how sure he was that the world was ranked according to what he loved best.   
  
“Then we were wandering around the grounds and I was feeling like an asshole,” Sulu says. “Because I wanted to kiss this petulant little – kid, and both of our PADDs went off at once, so we dug them out, and there it was, an invitation to fly the ship together for the next five years of our lives. He looked up at me and, in hindsight, that's when I knew he loved me. I wouldn't let myself do anything with it for awhile, not until we were in space, but I knew it then, in that little garden. There were palmetto trees and – finches chirping, and I was going to fly the best ship in the fleet, and Pavel loved me.”  
  
Sulu coughs out a laugh and looks over at Kirk. The color has returned to his face, but he looks ill, like remembering this is killing him.   
  
“It's funny, all the little things we do that save the world,” Sulu says. “You saved the world when you put me and Pavel on the _Enterprise_ together. You saved my life, and ruined it, too. Or maybe he's the one who did that.”  
  
Sulu looks away again, the fake amusement draining from his face. Kirk sighs and slumps down on the floor to look up at the ceiling, too, like doing so will mean that the two of them are reading the same book.   
  
“I think you need to come here every night,” Kirk says. “At least for a couple of weeks. Or you're going to start using again.”   
  
“Yeah, okay.” It doesn't sound like an agreement. Sulu is angry again, scowling at the ceiling. “Just, uh. As long as I'm not high on my shift, I don't see why I shouldn't just burn away the other hours as fast as I can. I mean, what am I supposed to do instead? Lie around and think about the good times?”  
  
“Let me worry about that,” Kirk says. “I'll give you things to do.”  
  
“So you're taking away my rec time, basically?”  
  
“Until you can earn it back, yeah.”   
  
Sulu groans and sits up. He winces as he does, and from Kirk's place on the floor Sulu's body looks very heavy, which only makes him want to try harder to lift Sulu entirely into his arms and hold him there, like he did when they were both weightless, in free fall.   
  
“What would have happened if I didn't dive after you that day?” Kirk asks. “Would he have caught you, just you, and then beamed me? The drill was unstable but I probably could have hung on until he locked on me. Even if I had fallen, too: he was a genius. He could have beamed you and then me, bam, bam, one, two, no problem.”  
  
Sulu doesn't offer any theories, and Kirk isn't sure what he's trying to suggest, but he's pretty sure that things would have been different not only between him and Sulu, but between Chekov and Sulu, too.   
  
“So there's your answer,” Sulu says, turning to look at Kirk.   
  
“Huh?”  
  
“You asked me once – you said you wouldn't just take a bullet for your crew, that you'd want to. I think that proves it, what you did. You didn't know me. I wasn't even your crew, not technically.”   
  
“Yeah, but.” Kirk sits up, feeling dizzy, and like Sulu just told him that they're not really even friends, which is something he worries about on a regular basis.   
  
“But, no, that doesn't answer it,” Kirk says. “I mean, the actual taking of the bullet, that's not at issue. It's whether or not I wanted to –”  
  
“You didn't want to or not want to,” Sulu says. “I think you just dove. It was automatic. That's who you are. And he was the guy who would catch people when they'd been reckless, not calmly but in this frantic dash to prove himself to everyone, to set things right. And I'm just the guy who falls.”   
  
“Jesus,” Kirk says. “You've done a lot more than falling since I've known you.”  
  
“Maybe, but my most essential characteristic is falling.” Sulu tips his head to the side and cracks his neck, as if he's trying to jar himself out of this conversation. “Think about it. The external initial dampener moment. My heroic contribution to the mission, my thing I'm remembered for. That was as intentional as falling over the side of the drill. And now, the other thing I'll be remembered for, losing him. People walk past me with these nervous smiles, holding their breath like they're driving past a graveyard. People look at me and see how I fell, and crashed. I'm like this – splatter who's walking around on two feet.”  
  
“Well, sure,” Kirk says, not interested in Sulu's self-pity. “But I still need you to fly the ship.”   
  
“Why?”  
  
Kirk shrugs. “'Cause you're the one I picked.”   
  
“By default. Because I was there when it all went down, when we all – _bonded_ or whatever. And that only happened because that other guy had lungworm.”   
  
“Right, and he got lungworm because he didn't wash properly, or ate at that Auxarian diner in town a week before Nero attacked, or drank out of somebody else's cup at a party. Grace in human error, man. Grace got you where you are, so don't knock it.”  
  
“Grace,” Sulu mutters. He looks down at his hands, and Kirk studies them, too. They're compact like the rest of him, strong but uncertain. It's an underrated quality in a pilot and in an officer in general: uncertainty. There's grace in that, too, the world-saving kind.   
  
“The only force I'm interested in is what took him,” Sulu says. “And I'm not talking about the scientific malfunction, the misaligned particles or chaos theory or any of that shit. I'm talking about why. That was the only mystery he wasn't interested in, and I was asking questions about it even before I lost him. He would scoff. 'You can't expect to find reason in _everything_ , Hikaru.' He'd look at me like I was five years old and asking about where babies came from if I wondered why things like this happen.”   
  
Kirk doesn't want to use the word 'God,' though he knows that's what Sulu is talking about. It's a politically incorrect term, a simplification of everything that concept was once supposed to stand for. Kirk rubs at the back of his neck and thinks of Sulu as a little boy, asking where babies came from. Maybe his sisters fed him horror stories to scare him.   
  
“Did you ever like girls?” Kirk asks, and Sulu looks up at him with surprise. “I mean, I know most people go for both, but I'm just trying to picture you with a girl.” It's also politically incorrect to talk about gender outside of anatomical concerns: those issues have been solved and put to bed. But when Kirk thinks about Sulu growing up as the only boy among three sisters, he wants to decide that it means something, even if it's something very small. It's the very small, hidden things that he's most interested in when it comes to Sulu.  
  
“Like them?” Sulu narrows his eyes. “You mean – was I attracted to them? Sure. Of course.”   
  
“Right.” Kirk clears his throat. “I go through – phases.”   
  
“That's pretty common, actually.” Sulu doesn't seem confused by this strain of conversation, just relieved to have abandoned the other. “Yeah, um, when I was a kid, you know, like most boys, I liked other boys first, 'cause they were more familiar, they were my friends, but then girls were this mysterious thing in the distance, so eventually they had more appeal. Probably until the end of high school? Then I got jaded about them and went back to guys, and vice versa toward the end of my Academy days. Then there was Pavel, and, you know. They say when you first really fall in love, that's the gender you'll be biased toward, but fuck. It's irrelevant. I know it sounds young and stupid to say I'll never love anyone else, but I know I won't. That's the one thing that makes me feel calm. I'm done with all of that.”   
  
Kirk just nods, willing to accept this. He thinks about his own progress through the years: Sam's friends were his first crush objects, grime-covered and red-eyed as they drifted through the house like lost spirits, confused but holy, high all the time. After Sam died, Kirk all but stripped and offered himself to them, and a couple of them fucked him, but they looked so depressed afterward that Kirk pretended not to know them when he saw them again, a favor they gladly returned. He got taller and stronger and decided to receive the worship of women for awhile, but they were always figuring him out and frowning, asking him who the hell he thought he was. He didn't even kiss a guy again until he got to the Academy, when he drank like a fish whenever he could get away with it, blacking out at parties and waking up with whoever. Bones straightened him out like any good friend would, but the fucking random strangers addiction was one he didn't really kick until he got his captaincy. On shore leave, he falls back into it easily.   
  
“So,” Sulu says, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Food, maybe, now.”   
  
Sulu eats some chicken satay and promptly throws it all up. Kirk wants to sit behind him in the bathroom, rub his back while he leans over the toilet, but Sulu shuts and locks the door.  
  
*  
  
Sulu's recovery is swifter than Kirk expected, and he wants to ask about the last time this happened, and the possible times before that, but he doesn't. He listens to stories about Chekov and wades through the worst of Sulu's moods, giving as good as he gets, never letting Sulu off the hook for the petty shit he sometimes says. He thinks that's why Sulu keeps coming around night after night, but it probably has more to do with the fact that Kirk is his captain and he ordered to Sulu to keep coming.  
  
In February, what would have been Chekov's twenty-first birthday approaches, and Kirk knows that it's on Sulu's mind, because last year he asked for a special shore leave for the two of them and took Chekov to Argos-9 to celebrate. It's a forested moon full of elaborate tree villages, known for its romantic honeymoon culture. Kirk had thought they might come back engaged, but they just came back with pictures of Chekov with flowers in his hair, pouting because Sulu made him put them there.   
  
They're playing darts when Kirk brings it up. He wants Sulu to be able to throw something hard if the conversation ends up warranting such a response.   
  
“I was thinking of putting together a little memorial dinner,” Kirk says as Sulu is taking aim. It's late; they've both cycled back around to not sleeping. Kirk's couch has effectively become Sulu's bed, and he's given Sulu's old room to Ensign York. Chekov's room remains untouched, and if Sulu goes there sometimes, Kirk doesn't know about it. It still has a code red sanitation warning, but that's a conversation topic for another day.  
  
“Memorial dinner,” Sulu says. He doesn't throw the dart, just stares at the board and taps the sharp point of the dart against his palm.   
  
“Yeah, 'cause. Well, you didn't get to go, you know. To the other memorial service.”  
  
He doesn't want to call it a funeral, because Sulu refused to call it that then. Sulu raises his eyebrows slowly, pokes his lips out a little.  
  
“Who would you invite?” Sulu asks.  
  
“Whoever you want.”  
  
“Why would I invite anybody? It's your idea.” Sulu whips the dart at the board. It's way off the mark, but the pointy end is almost completely buried in the cork.  
  
“Fine,” Kirk says. “I'd invite you, Spock, Uhura, Bones, Chapel, Scotty, Gaila – who else was he friends with?”  
  
“Lots of people,” Sulu says. “But he wasn't really close to many. He spent all his free time with me. I hoarded him.” Another dart zips toward the board, this one closer to the bullseye.  
  
“It could be just the eight of us, then,” Kirk says. “And we could just eat, or we could talk about –”  
  
“I'd prefer that there wasn't any talking about him,” Sulu says sharply. “Even if we all know that's why we're there. If you guys want to get together and – share your memories, fine. But I don't want to be there if that's what's going to happen.”  
  
“Okay.” Kirk knows Sulu doesn't want to cry in front of the others, in front of anybody.   
  
“In fact, I'd just as soon not do anything. Or not – take part.”  
  
“Okay. That's fine. I just thought I'd – throw that out there.”   
  
So on what would have been Chekov's twenty-first birthday, they spend the evening in Kirk's quarters as usual. Bones drops by, something he and Kirk planned in advance, potential backup, but Sulu is behaving normally, bent over some botany lab notes at Kirk's desk.  
  
“I think I can take it from here,” Kirk says when he's in the front room with Bones, pretending to give Bones the data files that Bones pretended to come for. Bones is giving him the suspicious look that he's been wearing more and more recently.  
  
“Kind of weird that he didn't want to do anything to celebrate,” Bones says.  
  
“Not really.” Kirk has seen weirder. On Sam's first post-death birthday, Kirk's mother painted Sam's old room black. Even the floor, even the ceiling. Kirk helped, because it was the kind of thing that, if done alone, would have swallowed his mother up forever, like the black hole she was trying to paint herself into.  
  
“That room's still rotting away,” Bones says. “Hate to think of the germs that are milling around in there.”   
  
“Well, it's vaccu-sealed like all the other rooms. There isn't going to be an outbreak of unwashed sheets.”   
  
Bones grunts. He looks over Kirk's shoulder as if he wants to catch a glimpse of Sulu.   
  
“This place isn't going to turn into that room, is it?” Bones asks. “He's been hiding out.”  
  
“What do you want him to do? Go to B-deck for a salsa dancing class? It's only been seven months.”   
  
Bones holds up his hands and heads for the door. “Just making sure,” he says. “Something about this is rubbing me the wrong way.”   
  
“Yeah, okay,” Kirk says. “Go and have fun with your teenage girlfriend.”   
  
Bones stops short and gives Kirk a look that makes him sincerely afraid for a moment.   
  
“She turned twenty last month,” Bones says tightly, then he storms out, and Kirk is glad to be alone in a way that makes him think Bones was probably right. This has become the new Temple of Chekov, because it houses the high priest.  
  
When Kirk walks back into his office Sulu is hunched over his PADD protectively, staring down at its glow, and Kirk doesn't have to sneak closer to know that he's looking at those pictures from Argos-9, Chekov with flowers in his hair. Sulu showed them to everyone when he got back, grinning like a maniac, so proud, and even Kirk, who had never looked twice at little Chekov, was jealous.   
  
“Want a drink?” Kirk calls, and Sulu jumps. He flips his PADD over on the desk before turning around to give Kirk an irritated look.  
  
“I'm trying to get some work done,” he says, and Kirk leaves him alone for the rest of the night.


	3. Chapter 3

In April there's a distress call and a difficult mission to Trike's third moon to liberate a prison colony. More than two Starfleet officers in the moon's tiny capital city would cause suspicion, and Sulu is the officer Kirk picks to accompany him, because he's the deadliest officer Kirk has when it comes to sudden hand to hand combat, and because he needs a challenge to knock him out of his routine. Because they both need it.   
  
Sulu doesn't look happy when he gets the assignment, probably because he's been spending way too much time in Kirk's company already, but on the morning of the beam-down he's got his game face on and his sword at his hip. They beam into the city under the pretense of gathering supplies, and they're the only humans around, earning long looks wherever they go. Kirk does what he can to gather information on the prison colony while Sulu watches his back.   
  
“Something doesn't feel right,” Sulu says as soon as they're behind the door of the motel room they rented for the first night. Kirk was prepared to tell Sulu that it's too dangerous to separate if he asked for separate rooms, but he didn't ask.   
  
“Of course something doesn't feel right,” Kirk says. “These people are hiding a prison colony full of Basthkin children.”   
  
“No, it's beyond that,” Sulu says. He's frowning, looking more like himself than Kirk has seen him in awhile, sure that he's right but unwilling to put words to his surety until he's gotten proof. He walks to the window and Kirk flops onto the bed, drawing a hand over his face. It was a long day, and the atmosphere here feels incorrectly terraformed, the air too thin.  
  
“Don't stand at the window,” Kirk says. “I'm sure they're keeping an eye on us.”  
  
“So we're not actually sleeping, right?” Sulu says, turning to eye the bed. There was only a single available, but it's big enough for two people.   
  
“We can take turns,” Kirk says. “You go first, I'll make coffee.”   
  
“That's not a coffee maker,” Sulu says, looking at the wall-mounted orrco machine. Orrco is kind of like motor oil, but it's digestible for humans and works as a stimulant.   
  
“If I think of it as coffee it'll be easier to swallow,” Kirk says. He walks over to the machine and flips it on. “It's black, anyway. Close enough.”  
  
“I don't really feel like sleeping,” Sulu says. He's pacing, his fingers playing along the handle of his sword.   
  
“Fine,” Kirk says. “At least sit down, get some rest. Tomorrow's going to be fucking – brutal, I can tell already.”   
  
Sulu cracks his knuckles and groans. He takes a seat on the end of the bed while Kirk falls into a rickety chair across from it, blowing on his steaming cup of orrco, trying not to gag at the smell. Sulu is staring at him, and he lets that go on for awhile before he looks back.  
  
“What?” Kirk barks, and Sulu grins.  
  
“Nothing,” he says. “I was just trying to figure out why I've got this bad feeling, you know, and how it might translate into what we're going to face tomorrow, and. Uh, five seconds. I got five whole seconds of not thinking about him. Most I've gotten so far.” He looks happy about this for approximately half a second longer, than his face falls and the whole room seems to get colder, the air thinner.   
  
“Congratulations,” Kirk says, and when Sulu looks up at him he actually thinks he's going to get punched. He'd let Sulu do it, and winces at his comment, shaking his head. “Sorry, that was stupid.”   
  
“Fucking – if you want me to just keep this shit to myself, I will,” Sulu says.   
  
“No, I don't,” Kirk says, ripped apart at the thought that Sulu would. “Sorry, I just – you know I'm shit at knowing what to say. You're the one who's eloquent about it, and all I can do is gape at you –”  
  
“Forget it,” Sulu says. He stands and paces some more, hands on his hips. Kirk drinks the orrco fast, and it burns his tongue so badly that his eyes water.   
  
Kirk crashes on the bed a couple of hours later, and when he wakes up Sulu is at the window with the curtains drawn, sitting in the chair with his feet propped up on the windowsill. He got his thumb and forefinger between his lips and seems to be chewing on the ends of them, staring at nothing. Kirk sits up with a groan and Sulu takes his feet down.   
  
“An hour until we move,” Sulu says before Kirk can ask about the time. He yawns and nods, his tongue still raw from being burned, the inside of his mouth like a desert. Sulu hands him a canteen full of water.  
  
“See anything while I slept?” Kirk asks, nodding to the window. Sulu shakes his head.  
  
“Just tumbleweeds,” he says.   
  
“Still have a bad feeling?” Kirk asks, because he does, too, worse than yesterday, the quiet of the town outside making his bones ache.   
  
“Yeah,” Sulu says. He shuffles a little, looking at the ground. “Don't take a bullet for me, okay?” he says. “If it comes to that.”   
  
“I thought you decided I can't help doing that.”   
  
“Oh, yeah,” Sulu mutters. He seems worried, and Kirk can't decide if it's because he's afraid he'll die today or afraid that he won't.   
  
They don't check out of the motel, not wanting to tip anyone off, just leave out a back door and head for the hills that surround the valley where the prison colony is supposedly located. The moon is silent like a sleeping thing, and the stars look unkind above them. The _Enterprise_ is at a nearby space station, and Kirk gets antsy whenever she's not in view.   
  
What greets them in the valley isn't a prison colony full of trapped children but a rotting graveyard. They both get sick, but not until the smell has seeped into their clothing, and the attack party chooses that moment to come barreling in, Kirk bent over with his hands on his knees and Sulu kneeling on the ground, wiping at his mouth. The attack is too chaotic for anything as reasoned as bullet-taking, and the Mythros slavers are using stone-tipped arrows. Kirk takes two in his back before they're able to take down enough slavers to get the rest running. Sulu has an arrow in his leg but doesn't seem to have noticed, and doesn't start limping until he's helping Kirk into a cave, barking into his helplessly scrambled communicator.   
  
“The Rescue party will come in four hours even without our – _ahh_ , our signal,” Kirk says. He's lying on his stomach on the cold, damp floor of the cave, trying not to think about those murdered children, the bodies, the smell. He only remembers the arrows in his back when he catches a glimpse of Sulu's face, and then, suddenly, the pain is unbelievable.   
  
“Captain,” Sulu says as Kirk grits his teeth and punches the ground, maybe snapping a pinkie.   
  
“It's okay,” Kirk says. “Just a flesh wound.” One of the arrows feels like it's snagged in his lung, but that can't be right, because he'd be choking on his blood already. He draws ragged breath, waiting to taste that hot metal in his mouth.  
  
“Fuck,” Sulu whispers. He's holding his hands out like he wants to touch Kirk but is afraid to get near him. “Should I – pull them out? Fuck, you're bleeding, sir, a lot, ah, I think I need to get them out so I can plug the wounds.”   
  
“No, just, wait.” Kirk isn't sure why he's taking this tack, because there's no way he's going to last like this for four hours. “Just – ahh, fuck – just let me think.”   
  
“Here, I have my kit,” Sulu says, and when he fumbles it from his belt Kirk sees how badly his hands are shaking. He allows himself to imagine how ruined Sulu would be by watching him die here, and some of his worry dissipates, because he trusts himself not to let that happen. It can't. Sulu wouldn't recover, and he's so tender already, all of his hardness long gone as he presses a hypospray carefully to Kirk's neck.  
  
“It – it'll only last a few hours,” Sulu says. “And it's the only one we've got – do you want it now or, or later?”  
  
“Now,” Kirk says without thinking, and when he opens his mouth to change his mind, Sulu punctures him with the hypospray.   
  
“There,” Sulu says, his voice shaking now, too. “There.” He touches Kirk's shoulder, then throws the empty hypospray away. “D-do you want water, um, what should I –”  
  
“We have to get the arrows out, Lieutenant.”  
  
“Oh – fuck, fuck, okay.”   
  
“I take it you haven't done this before.”  
  
“Not exactly, sir, no. But I took emergency medical at the Academy, I know the – theory.”  
  
“Good, well. I believe the theory is not to break them.”  
  
“I believe – yes, yeah, absolutely.” Sulu is a mess, and Kirk loves him so much, it's never been clearer.   
  
“Practice on yourself first,” Kirk says, gesturing to the snapped off arrow that's stuck in Sulu's leg. Sulu looks down at it as if he'd forgotten it and hisses, touching the frayed wooden tip.   
  
“I don't know if I can –”  
  
“Yes, you can, Lieutenant. Your hands are steadier than mine right now, believe me. Just take a deep breath, wait until you're ready, and do it. Get a bandage ready first so you can stop the blood flow.”   
  
Sulu nods and lets out a long, choppy breath. He takes the knife out of his boot and uses it to cut a long strip of cloth from the hem of his uniform shirt. Emergency bandaging procedure one-oh-one. Kirk feels like he's watching this happen only to Sulu, not really present except to hover close to him as a comforting spirit.  
  
“Okay,” Sulu says. He puts his back to the wall of the cave and takes a deep breath, reaching for the end of the arrow. “Okay.”  
  
“Be decisive,” Kirk says. The pain in his back has faded to a worrying numbness, and blinking is beginning to get tiring. “Pull straight and steady. You can do it, Hikaru.”   
  
“I know,” Sulu says, suddenly petulant, giving Kirk a look that fades quickly when he remembers that Kirk has two arrows sticking out of his back. Kirk grins.   
  
“Want me to count for you?” Kirk asks when Sulu hesitates, breathing hard through his nose.  
  
“No – yeah,” Sulu says. He nods, wets his lips. “Yeah, please.”   
  
So Kirk counts, and on three Sulu pulls the arrow out with a scream. It comes away clean, and he hurries to bandage the gushing wound, wincing.   
  
“Good job, Lieutenant,” Kirk says. He's fading, his whole uniform shirt soaked with blood that's beginning to pool under his stomach as he lies on the cave floor. “One down, two to go.”  
  
“Fuck, Captain,” Sulu says as he crawls over toward him on his knees. “The – blood, what if – when I pull them out –”  
  
“It'll be alright,” Kirk says, because he's decided that it must be. He won't be the tug that breaks the tether for Sulu, he won't make Sulu watch him die. “Just wait until you're ready, and do these just like you did the other one.”   
  
“Right, right.” Sulu puts one hand on Kirk's back to steady himself. Kirk can't really feel it, but he knows it's there.  
  
“C'mon, Sulu,” he says. “We've got to stop the bleeding.”   
  
He's still talking like he's coaching Sulu through something that he has no stake in personally. His professors used to compliment him for this at the Academy, his ability to erase himself completely while still maintaining command. They said it was something that couldn't be taught, an innate ability, but Kirk remembers learning how to erase himself, because it wasn't easy.  
  
“Okay,” Sulu says. He takes hold of the arrow that's higher on Kirk's back. “Brace yourself.”  
  
“I'm braced,” Kirk says, his voice starting to slur a little.   
  
“Okay.” Sulu's hand slides up to the back of Kirk's neck, and he can feel that, his fingers pinching in, steadying there. “One. Two.”   
  
Kirk passes out, and wakes up when Sulu is pulling out the other arrow. He makes some horrible caveman noise and dry heaves while Sulu curses and uses the rest of his shirt, then one of his pant legs, to try and stop the bleeding. Kirk loses consciousness again, and comes out of it at intervals, confused half thoughts and memories rising and falling behind his eyes as if he's traveling over a broken road, the hills like waking and the valleys like being pushed, forcefully, into something that doesn't really resemble sleep. He hasn't been this badly hurt on a mission in awhile, but the pain is not the issue. He feels as if he's got a gauge behind his eyelids and he's watching the meter fall as more and more blood drains from him.  
  
“Shit,” Sulu says, over and over. He got one arm around Kirk's shoulders, his back to the cave wall, Kirk's head in his lap. His other hand is pressed over Kirk's ear, and it's shaking badly.   
  
“I'm not going to die or anything,” Kirk says, laughing at the delirious sound of his voice, because he doesn't feel _that_ far gone, but he sounds like he is.   
  
“You'll be okay,” Sulu says, petting Kirk's ear with his thumb. “No problem. Just gotta wait it out. No problem.”  
  
“I think you need to talk to me,” Kirk says, fighting to keep his eyes open. All he can see is Sulu's remaining pant leg and the cave, and the prospect of trying to stay alive for the next three and a half hours isn't so bad as long as Sulu keeps moving his thumb like that.   
  
“Talk to you, yeah, to keep you, okay, sure.” Sulu's hand tightens on Kirk's shoulder. “What – what should I – ”  
  
“Tell me about when you were fucked up before,” Kirk says. “Your previous experience with detox.”   
  
“Oh – sure.” Sulu's thumb stops moving, and Kirk regrets introducing this topic, but he couldn't think of anything else. “I was – it was right after I started at the Academy. My roommate was into it, and I was into him. He would only fuck me when we were both high, so. Yeah. Didn't end well.”   
  
“Somebody fucked you,” Kirk says, coughing up a laugh that hurts. “That's. I don't know. Hard to believe.”  
  
Sulu stiffens, but then he pets Kirk's ear again, once. “Yeah? Why?”   
  
“'Cause, I don't know. Pavel.”  
  
“Yeah, well. Like I said. I mostly, uh. I'd go from one extreme to the other, you know. It's normal.”  
  
“Totally normal,” Kirk says, laughing again. “So what was this fucking drug, anyway? Pills?”  
  
“No, it's – this stuff you load into a hypospray. It's – it's bad. After things went to hell with this guy, I ended up in the hospital, half-dead on this shit. My father had to personally lobby the dean to keep him from putting a mark on my record.”  
  
“Who the hell's your father?” Kirk asks, though he knows, because he's read Sulu's personnel files backward and forward and upside down.   
  
“Hideki Sulu. The biologist.”  
  
“Oh, right. And your mom – your mom plays the piano.”  
  
“Uh-huh.” Sulu is quiet for a moment, his hands twitching, keeping Kirk from shutting down, because he doesn't want to miss a second of Sulu touching him.   
  
“My parents,” Sulu says. “It's weird.”   
  
“Yeah? Well, it usually is.”   
  
“They've always felt like – benefactors or something. Shit, why am I telling you this – are you okay?”  
  
“Yeah, but keep talking, I need something to focus on.” Kirk is starting to get very cold, and he knows his shivering is freaking Sulu out.   
  
“I – well,” Sulu says. He clears his throat. Kirk has a loose enough grip on his mind now to admit to himself that he'd like to see Sulu cry over him.   
  
“They, um. When I overdosed on that shit, when I woke up, they were both there. My mom missed a concert. My dad wouldn't look me in the eye. I felt like they both knew it was over a – boy, and I wanted to die. When my sisters busted in, crying and freaking out, it was this huge relief, you know, not to be alone with my parents. I never was, growing up. My sisters were always this – comfortable buffer, like white noise. My parents expected more from me because I was the boy. You're not supposed to – acknowledge stuff like that, I guess, but we all knew it. My sisters were allowed to obsess over their love lives and break down and have tantrums, but I wasn't. My parents would get so cold with me if I dared to be anything but – well, stoic, actually. 'Cause that's how they both are. I was the one who was supposed to grow up to be like them. Maybe it was just because I was the youngest, their last chance, I don't know. But I think it would have been different if I was the fourth girl.”  
  
“Remember last time when we thought we were going to die?” Kirk says. He can't get the dopey, half-dead smile off his face, so he turns his cheek more snugly into Sulu's thigh to hide it from him.   
  
“Yeah,” Sulu says. “Captain, you're shaking really hard.”  
  
“Am I? I thought that was you. But, listen – you didn't tell me these stories last time. Did Pavel know? About the overdose? Your parents?”  
  
“I –” Sulu says. Kirk figures he'll be forgiven for the question, but only if he actually dies. “No – no. I never told him about this stuff. His parents thought he was perfect. I mean, he _was_ perfect, and they knew it. And he never would have – done what I did, just for some guy, some asshole. No, he never knew. He knew that I'm not close with my parents, but that's it. I'm glad I never told him about the rest.”  
  
“Why? You think he would have thought less of you?”  
  
“Yeah,” Sulu says, very softly. He's either pinching Kirks' ear hard without noticing it or Kirk's nervous system is playing tricks on him. Most of his body feels unavailable at the moment, so he can't venture a guess.  
  
“I don't think he would have,” Kirk says. “I think he would have liked to know.”   
  
“No. He didn't like – weak people.”  
  
“He knew you weren't weak.”   
  
“He thought he did.”   
  
Kirk tries to refute this, but he's barely forming words coherently as it is, and his eyelids are too heavy to keep open now. He lets them fall shut, reminding some deeper and more essential part of himself that lies beyond his consciousness that dying is not an option.   
  
“The truth is, nobody really knows me as well as they think they do,” Sulu says, or maybe Kirk dreams this, because it's what he'd like Sulu to say. He slips into what he considers to be a hallucination, though it can't be, because his eyes are closed. Chekov sits in the cave across from them, his legs folded, hands on his knees.   
  
“Hikaru,” Chekov says. “Give me a little credit.”   
  
“No,” Kirk says, lifting his hand to cover Sulu's mouth. “Don't tell him. Don't tell him anything.”   
  
Kirk might have trusted Sulu to the real Chekov, but there's no way in hell he's trusting him to Chekov's ghost.  
  
He wakes up in sick bay, alone, though he can sense the nearness of Bones, his voice droning from somewhere across the room. He can feel Sulu close by, too, though he's not making any sound. There's a shadow behind a privacy curtain to his left that has Sulu's particular density. He drifts to sleep again, imagining he can feel the lightness of new blood flowing through him, remaking him like a toxin flush.   
  
When he opens his eyes again, Bones is studying the machines on the wall that Kirk is plugged into, and the privacy curtain has been pulled back. Sulu is in the bio bed beside Kirk's, and he looks over at Kirk when he turns his head. Sulu doesn't say anything when their eyes meet, just smiles a little, as if it can be their secret, Kirk's cognizance.   
  
“Supposed to be a fucking peaceful mission,” Bones is muttering, plugging readings from the heavy duty machines into his tricorder. “As if such a thing could exist anywhere in the goddamn universe.”  
  
“Peace is a black hole,” Sulu says, holding Kirk's gaze. “Unless you come out the other end and find an alternate universe.”  
  
“Don't talk to me about alternate universes,” Bones says. “The idea depresses me. One is bad enough.”  
  
“Still overflowing with gratitude over the survival of your best friend?” Chapel says, appearing with a tray of water and meds. She smiles at Kirk. “Look who's awake. Just in time to hear the doctor denounce all universes everywhere.”  
  
“Music to my ears,” Kirk says, his voice scratchy enough to make him wonder how long he was out. He's doped up pretty good, enough to allow him to give Bones and Chapel a quick grin and then let his eyes settle on Sulu again. Sulu is wearing a fresh uniform, and Kirk imagines his leg is bandaged tightly beneath his left pant leg. He's plugged into the wall like Kirk, his readings beeping steadily. It's a comforting sound, the translation of a human heartbeat by machines.   
  
“Arrows,” Bones says, leaning over Kirk. “Of all goddamn things.”   
  
“Better than shrink rays,” Kirk says. He remembers what they found at the prison colony and the amusement drains from his face. It's not that they were too late, because it was all a set up in the first place, but it still feels like that, the way it did when Chekov got blasted to nothing, like he's moving through the universe in cement shoes, too slow to really make a difference.   
  
He's released from sick bay the following afternoon, returned to his quarters under Sulu's care. It might as well be Sulu, they all decide, since he's on leave until Bones pronounces him fit for duty. Kirk is fuzzy-headed from the painkillers and can't sleep with the memories of those bodies, that smell, and the ghost of Chekov in the cave. He slumps in his bed and Sulu sits on top of the blankets beside him, neither of them saying much, as if they've already spent their quota of words that they're allowed to exchange this week.   
  
In the middle of the night, Kirk wakes up to the feeling of Sulu's hands on his chest. Sulu seems not to see him as Kirk stares up at him, knowing that it's not a tender or even intentional touch, that Sulu is sleepwalking.  
  
“Oh,” Sulu says when Kirk thumps his shoulder to wake him. Sulu blinks back into semi-consciousness and takes his hands away.   
  
“I thought,” he says. “I thought you had blood on you.” He rolls over and goes back to sleep, and only then does Kirk acknowledge the fact that they've been sharing his bed since they got out of sick bay. It's such a big bed that it's easy not to notice that there's someone else in it. Kirk stares across the ocean of the blankets at Sulu's back, an island in the distance again.  
  
They're both back on the bridge in less than three days. Kirk is still tender and Sulu is limping a little. Neither of them is talking much to anybody, least of all to each other, but Sulu still spends most of his time in Kirk's room, though he's back to sleeping on the couch, which means he probably remembers and regrets the sleepwalking incident.   
  
“What exactly is going on with Sulu?” Bones asks Kirk a week later as he's examining his platelet levels and the wounds on his back, the starburst scars nearly gone already.   
  
“What do you mean?” Kirk asks, and Bones snorts.  
  
“Fine, play dumb,” he says. “But people are starting to talk. He's always in your room. You're not – fucking around with the guy, are you?”  
  
“No.” Kirk scowls at Bones. “What the – why would you –”  
  
“Because based on his last psych evals, I wouldn't recommend it.”  
  
“What – why, what did the evals say?”  
  
“That's classified, Jim, and you know it.”  
  
“Yeah, and you know I have override rights on classified information if I feel like it might compromise –”  
  
“Jesus, I knew you'd say that. Alright, well.” Bones looks over his shoulder. Chapel is across the main sick bay area, reviewing charts. Bones watches her for awhile, then sighs.   
  
“Three months ago he was still telling his therapist that he didn't believe Chekov was actually dead.”   
  
“Well. That was three months ago.”   
  
“Right, and you know what's happened between then and now? His mandated therapy sessions have ended. For all we know, he's still – delusional.”   
  
“No, I don't think so,” Kirk says. “He talks about Chekov in the past tense.”  
  
Bones' eyebrows shoot up. “He talks about it – with you?”  
  
“Well, yeah.” Kirk sits up a little straighter. “What do you think we – oh, wait, I know what you think we're doing.”  
  
“I don't really think that. I just wanted to make sure.”  
  
“Don't worry,” Kirk says with a scoff, sliding off the examining table. “I'm not trying to get into our damaged pilot's pants. I guess you think that's my _style_ , but –”  
  
“Jim, I don't think that. Hey!”   
  
Kirk stops before storming out of sick bay and turns back to Bones, whose stern expression melts when their eyes meet. Bones sighs and pulls a hand through his hair, looking exasperated, and worried.   
  
“It's not him I would be concerned about, necessarily,” Bones says.   
  
“What the hell do you mean?” Kirk knows exactly, but he wants to hear Bones say it so he can have a tantrum. He hates that he could never tell Sulu, _Nobody knows me as well as they think they do_ , because Bones does. He knows what's going on, and Kirk feels stripped, but he pretends not to, out of habit. Bones opens his hands and holds out his palms.  
  
“Look,” he says. “I get it.”  
  
“No, you don't,” Kirk says, because Bones might know him well enough to understand what's happening, but he doesn't _get_ it. Bones is in love with his twenty-year-old nurse, a sweet-faced girl with soft blond hair, and he's worried about how his daughter would feel about if she ever found out. Kirk is in love with someone whose heart lives in an empty ensign's room, wrapped in dirty sheets, beating very faintly but still indestructible as long as it stays where he left it.   
  
“Fine,” Bones says. “It's a moot point anyway, I guess.” Everything about his tone says that he knows it isn't. Kirk just walks away, feeling drained of blood again.  
  
“We should play basketball or something,” he says to Sulu that night. They're bent over their respective PADDs on the couch, Kirk switching back and forth between a report on engineering deck 5 and some vintage cartoon pornography he's been getting into lately. Sulu looks up from whatever he's doing on his own PADD and makes a face.  
  
“You want to hear something sad?” he says.  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“I haven't fenced since Pavel died.”   
  
It's almost definitely the first time the words _Pavel died_ have left Sulu's lips. The eight month mark is coming up. Kirk licks over his teeth and waits for a reasonable course of action to present itself.   
  
“But whatever,” Sulu says. “Sometimes it feels good to give things up.”   
  
“I don't think _good_ is the right word,” Kirk says. Sulu nods in agreement and tosses his PADD onto the couch. They go to the gym, but neither of them can really get into it, so after thirty minutes of basketball they return to the room and get drunk instead.   
  
“Tell me about this guy who you OD'd over,” Kirk says when they're both pretty out of it, lying on the floor with their heads tipped back and looking up at the aquarium, which looks like an alien landscape from where they are.   
  
“He was a shithead,” Sulu says, and Kirk nods, thinking that's all he's going to get. Sulu rolls onto his stomach and picks at the carpet. Kirk stares at him until he can see the pump of his pulse in the blue aquarium light. His tongue actually hurts for not being able to lick Sulu there, burns like a bastard.   
  
“His name was Carl,” Sulu says. “He was blond. Everybody liked him. I thought he was really smart, but it turns out he actually wasn't – didn't matter. His professors loved him, too. He was on command track, specialized in combat strategy. Always looking for a fight. We used to get fucked up and go out to local bars, the kind of dives nobody else in school would go near, and he'd start something with somebody who was more fucked up than we were. After we kicked the guy's ass we'd go back to our room and he'd nail me to the floor. It was like he was always trying to convince me I didn't really want it, but the harder he fucked me, the more determined I was to like it.”   
  
Kirk rolls onto his side, toward Sulu, who's still picking at the carpet. He thinks of Sulu with his bruised knuckles a few months back and wonders who was fucking him then. Probably nobody. Sulu would have killed anyone who tried.  
  
“So what happened to Carl?” Kirk asks.   
  
“I, uh. I turned him in when I OD'd, for stealing the stuff we were shooting from the med lab on campus. It was a condition of my release, negotiated by my father, and I agreed to do it when I was pretty sure I was going to die from coming down. Anyway, he threatened to kill me. Carl, not my father. It was weird, because suddenly it was like I'd never really wanted him at all. It scared the shit out of me, because I used to hear songs and apply the lyrics to him, that kind of garbage. It all felt fake when it was over, and I was afraid everything always would.” He smiles strangely, and Kirk regrets letting him drink as much as they did, but then again, something had to give.   
  
“Pavel showed me that wasn't true,” Sulu says. “But it doesn't really mean much now, because he's still gone, and he took all the parts of me that I liked with him.”  
  
They end up sleeping on the floor that night. In the morning they're both sore, and neither of them speaks. Sulu eats lunch in the mess, at the alpha crew table with Kirk and Bones and Uhura, and he doesn't say much, but he smiles at Uhura's jokes. Kirk is pretty sure he remembers their conversation and that it freaked him out. Sulu disappears after their shift and Kirk successfully waits out two uncertain hours before doing a ship-wide search for Sulu's signal. He's in the botany lab, not Chekov's old room. Kirk stares at his monitor until the dot that represents Sulu moves, then closes the screen like he's been caught. Sulu is at his door ten minutes later, looking nervous.  
  
“I don't have a room anymore,” he says, lingering in the hallway.   
  
“That's – it's okay,” Kirk says, though he should probably offer him a new one. Instead, he steps out of the way, and Sulu walks inside. He seems antsy, and when he goes for the wet bar, Kirk is relieved. If they can't get put in a life or death situation that forces them to talk to each other, at least they can pretend they're drunker than they are, end up on the floor, and feign surprise when they survive until morning.  
  
“How'd you lose your virginity?” Kirk asks after they've both refilled each other's glasses a few times. Sulu snorts and reaches into his glass to grab a piece of half-melted ice.  
  
“To this girl, when I was fifteen,” he says. He pops the ice in his mouth, and the way it muffles his speech is obscenely arousing. “She loved me, you know, in the way that fifteen-year-old girls love fifteen-year-old boys. I felt bad about not loving her back, so I stayed with her for the rest of high school. It was pretty excruciating. My sisters hated her. How about you?”  
  
“Yeah, I hated her, too,” Kirk says, and Sulu laughs.   
  
“I mean your virginity.”   
  
“Oh. Yeah, I was fourteen, uh. Pretty messed up about my brother. It was one of his friends, and it hurt like hell. I don't think he really knew what he was doing, and I sure as shit didn't.” He shrugs, annoyed by Sulu's unblinking stare. “Then, you know, girls, a few years later. The kind who fall in love with teenage boys. They all ended up hating me, though. I wasn't faithful to anyone. I was addicted to betrayal.” He laughs at himself.  
  
“Your brother died when you were fourteen?” Sulu says. They haven't discussed the specifics. On that night when they almost froze to death they started with the big, life-wrecking things and worked their way back toward the details, but they were rescued before most of them were mentioned.   
  
“Thirteen,” Kirk says. “Bad luck, right?”  
  
Sulu doesn't say anything. They're sitting on the floor with their backs to the couch, their glasses leaving wet rings on the carpet. They're both still in uniform, though Kirk is in his sock feet. Sulu never takes his boots off anymore.   
  
“He was huffing, right?” Sulu says.  
  
“Yeah. Synthax.”  
  
“And you're the one who –”  
  
“Found him, uh-huh. That silver stuff under his nose. It was like. I knew he was dead, but I thought he would either come back to life or not based on my mother's reaction.”  
  
Her reaction was confirmation that Sam was gone forever. It was like watching a volcanic eruption swallow up an entire unprepared village and only being able to stand there with his arms at his sides, doing nothing. Kirk's mother cracked one of Sam's ribs, trying to revive him, and Kirk still wakes up to that sound sometimes, sitting up stock straight in bed, eyes wide, feeling responsible.   
  
“They said I might have died when I overdosed, but it didn't feel that way when I woke up,” Sulu says. “I guess because no one forgave me.”  
  
“That's the difference between surviving your OD or not,” Kirk says, though he doesn't really know what he's talking about. Sulu runs his finger around the wet rim of his glass, and it's like he's thinking about eating more ice but isn't sure if that would be disrespectful or not, considering the conversation. Kirk wants to reach into the glass, take a piece of ice from it, and slip it between Sulu's parted lips.   
  
“Not that it's fair to compare, you know,” Sulu says, sneaking a nervous look at Kirk, who is touched by the idea that Sulu actually worries about hurting his feelings. “Me and him.”  
  
“My brother was so angry at my dad for dying,” Kirk says. “And he was angry at me and my mom for being alive. I tried to get like that after Sam died, angry. But my mother was this – supernova of misery, and I felt like a pretender in comparison, so I mostly just, you know. Refilled her drinks and tried to keep quiet while she slept.”  
  
“What's your best memory of your brother?” Sulu asks.  
  
Kirk shrugs. “He taught me how to swim. It made me feel invincible. Floating, you know, and opening my eyes underwater. We would play these games, just me and him, because he was too grown-up for make believe when his friends were around. We would swim in the lake behind our house and pretend we were drifting through space when we were underwater, that someone had shot us out an airlock or we'd slipped while making repairs. When you ran out of air and had to come up to the surface, that meant you'd died.”  
  
He looks over at Sulu, and for a couple of seconds comes really close to feeding him a piece of ice.   
  
“Sam always won,” Kirk says. “I always died first.”   
  
Sulu climbs up onto the couch and passes out with his face in the cushions. Kirk stretches out on the floor and listens to Sulu breathe. At one point he sits up and drinks the melted ice from Sulu's glass. It's coppery with whiskey contamination and tastes nothing like Sulu's lips. Kirk is pretty sure he knows what they taste like by instinct, the way that birds know which trees bear the fruit they should eat. He watches Sulu sleep for awhile, the rise and fall of his breath, and thinks about the girl Sulu lost his virginity to, the one who loved him, but he can't come up with any mental picture except one of himself at fifteen, scrawny and damaged. He makes himself lie down again, and dreams that he's the guy at the Academy who got Sulu hooked on hypo'ing drugs. They sit on the floor of their dorm room and Kirk watches Sulu's eyelids grow heavy with the high, knowing that he's ruining him, the door double-bolted and someone outside trying to kick it down.   
  
*  
  
By the one year anniversary of Chekov's death, everyone on the ship thinks that Kirk and Sulu are sleeping together, except for Bones, who knows that what they're actually doing is worse. Sulu essentially lives in Kirk's room, though he would never say so out loud. They waste their days like the only two people who know that the world ended, and when Sulu starts fencing again he doesn't practice in the gym but in the middle of Kirk's stateroom, like he's embarrassed about it but not particularly worried about Kirk's opinion. Kirk works on his PADD and pretends not to watch Sulu out of the corner of his eye, battling invisible enemies.   
  
They cut back on their drinking and spend more time out in the ship's public areas, trying to prove something to the rest of the crew, and to themselves, but mostly to each other. Sulu wants Kirk to think that he's a self-contained disaster that won't bleed out into the universe and destroy everything in a fifty mile radius as soon as somebody gives him a good enough excuse, and Kirk wants Sulu to think that he's buying it.   
  
Toward the end of the day that marks a full year without Chekov, Kirk looks up from the tinkering he's doing on a Sublarthian crystal charger that Spock brought him from an away mission and sees Sulu wearing his dress uniform and holding a box.   
  
“I'm going to go to Chekov's room and put all the stuff I want to keep in here,” he says. He sounds like he expects Kirk to react violently to this. Kirk watches Sulu swallow heavily, allowing the statement to absorb an appropriate amount of oxygen from the room.  
  
“I'll come with you,” Kirk says, standing.  
  
“No –”  
  
“I mean to stand outside the door. That's all.”  
  
Sulu thinks about this for a minute, then nods.   
  
They walk through the halls, Sulu with both arms wrapped around his empty box, Kirk starting to get nervous about what Sulu might put in it. Sulu has showered recently; Kirk can smell the shampoo that he's washed out of his neatly combed hair. He realizes that Sulu is going to be in there awhile and that he should have brought a book or his PADD, but it's not like he's going to be able to concentrate on anything except whatever is going on inside the room.   
  
He doesn't say anything while Sulu keys in the entry code, just holds the box for him, then hands it back to him without looking inside. He expected the smell of ripe decay to waft out into the hallway immediately, but it's not like Chekov's dead body is actually in there. It's nowhere and everywhere, each molecule pulled apart as perfectly as possible, tossed to the far corners of at least a billion galaxies. The clean, cold beauty of that particular death fits him perfectly, and Kirk somehow hadn't realized that until now. Sulu holds his gaze for a minute before going in, and Kirk can tell he wants to say something, but then he seems to decide that he'd better not and just walks inside, shutting the door behind him.  
  
Kirk stands for as long as he can, then sits on the floor. People who pass by start to ask him what's going on, then they realize which room he's sitting outside of, and think about the date, and keep walking. Kirk tries to hear what's going on inside, but of course he can't. All of the rooms on the ship are flawlessly sound-proofed.  
  
He thinks about this day, one year ago, about sitting down in the chair where he knew he would be sitting when he told Sulu what had happened. And the way Sulu looked at him, like he would never be forgiven, and how Kirk took that bullet, but didn't want to.  
  
When Sulu comes out, the top of the box is closed. Kirk scrambles up to stand beside him, checking his face for tear tracks, but there's nothing like that, only weariness. Sulu hugs the box to his chest, his fingers flexing around the corners like he's trying not to show Kirk that it's burning his hands.   
  
“Now the rest of the room can be cleaned,” he says. “And then I want to move into this room, after it's scrubbed bare. Okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Kirk says, without even thinking about what he's agreeing to. But it's not much, not an unreasonable request, and it's not like Sulu was going to continue haunting Kirk's quarters forever.   
  
“Okay,” Sulu repeats, nodding. They go back to Kirk's room, and Kirk puts in the order to have Chekov's old room stripped and washed while Sulu sits on the couch with the box in his lap, looking dazed. Kirk leaves him alone for a few hours, then goes to the sitting room and stands in the doorway, fidgeting.   
  
“Let me show you something,” he says, and he walks to his bedroom, not expecting Sulu to follow. He doesn't, just stays on the couch with the box. He's there when Kirk returns holding the little music player with its dirty old headphones wrapped around it. Sulu looks up, and when his eyes fall on the music player it's like Kirk doesn't need to explain.  
  
“Sam's,” Kirk says. “Old technology, barely works anymore. I usually don't want to listen to it, anyway. Hated his taste in music. Noise jams, found instruments, angry teenager shit. It's the only thing I have left, though. My mom burned a lot of his stuff, but I kept some of it for awhile, had this poster that used to be on the wall in his room framed, had it on the wall in my room at the Academy. I had to make up this story about it for Bones, like it was ironic or something, a joke. I think that's what made me not want it anymore. I gave it to my mom, and she got really upset, like the keeping Sam's shit around stage is over and I should have known that.”  
  
They sit on the couch for the rest of the night, Sulu with the box full of Chekov's things in his lap, each of them with one ear bud from Sam's music player in their ears. When Kirk wakes up in the morning, Sulu is asleep with his head in Kirk's lap, still hugging the box with one arm, drooling on Kirk's thigh. The music player is dead, batteries run out, and Kirk isn't sure he knows where the charger is anymore.  
  
Sulu moves into Chekov's old room that afternoon, and he won't let Kirk help him with his boxes. They disappear one at a time, until the only Sulu artifact left in Kirk's room is a bar of soap he forgot, on the ledge in the shower. Kirk pulls a double shift and comes back to his room feeling feverish. He goes straight for his PADD.  
  
 _Forgot your soap_ , he sends. Sulu's response doesn't come until the morning, when Kirk wakes up on the couch and digs the PADD out from between the cushions.  
  
 _It's all yours_ , Sulu sends, and then, in second message, _Thanks, Captain_ , like whatever happened is over now. Kirk washes with Sulu's soap, puts on the pants that Sulu drooled on, and goes back on shift.  
  
*  
  
There's an attack by Klingons a month later that allows Kirk to forget all of the useless days that have come before, the reports that he heard but didn't listen to and the nights when every piece of furniture in his quarters seemed to stare at him and ask if he really expected to be taken seriously. The attack is swift and the damage is minimal, but it snaps everyone back into being their best selves for those important five minutes, and they're all drunk with pride afterward, even Spock, though he pretends not to be.   
  
Somebody arranges a party and Kirk doesn't correct people when they give him credit for it, slapping his shoulders and telling him it was a great idea. There's nothing quite like a lot of young people who are entrusted with expensive Federation equipment celebrating the fact that they cheated death, and though Kirk has been to parties like this before, this one feels particularly profound, probably because Sulu uses the opportunity to start talking to him again.   
  
They've both had a few beers, but neither of them associates drinking heavily with happiness, so they're just barely buzzed, laughing a little too loudly and touching each other's shoulders for emphasis while they talk. The music is loud and the lights in the rec room have been dimmed so that it looks less sterile than it usually does. Girls are dancing, skirts twirling.  
  
“So that was some fucking maneuver to get away from that heat seeker,” Kirk says, possibly for the fifth time. Sulu beams like he'll never get tired of hearing it.   
  
“I figured you'd kick my ass if it didn't work,” he says. “So I made sure it did.”   
  
Kirk is so attracted to him in the moment that he feels like he could get hard just from watching him act cocky, so he takes a long pull of beer and looks away, across the room. The last time they had a party like this Sulu and Chekov were in a corner together, Chekov molesting Sulu for being impressive, drunk and giddy, messing up Sulu's hair. Everyone smiled as they passed, appreciating the two of them like they would a spiked punch bowl or a DJ's table, an important component of any celebration. Sulu seems to remember this roughly at the same instant that Kirk does, and his face changes. He goes to his drink, but it's empty.  
  
“You want to get out of here?” Kirk asks. He's joking, but Sulu nods.  
  
It seems like the whole ship is in the rec room, though of course that's not true. The halls are empty, at any rate. Kirk and Sulu walk down to one of the best windows on space, the big one near the library and the quiet virtual reality rooms where you can pretend you're hiking in the mountains or watching an opera in Italy. Kirk isn't a realist but he's always avoided all but the simplest virtual reality programs, because that way lies madness for people who want to change the past. Even his mother never let herself dip into that particular dark pool.  
  
Sulu sits on the ledge and looks out at the stars. He refilled his cup before leaving the party, but he doesn't drink from it, just holds it with both hands like it's a warm mug. Kirk sits down beside him and stares at Sulu's knee, wishing he was drunk enough to say something honest.  
  
“Bones is fighting with Chapel,” he says instead. “She thinks he doesn't respect her. Did you ever get that? Because of the age difference?” The last thing he wants to talk about right now is Chekov, but he always seems to bring Chekov up as soon as possible when that's the case.  
  
Sulu looks over at Kirk like he only heard half of that. Kirk wonders how he's been spending his nights. He seems good, healthy, but like this might have come at the expense of barring access to certain parts of himself.  
  
“He, um.” Sulu scratches at the back of his neck. “He was insecure about his age, yeah. He only wanted to be called 'baby' when he was getting fucked. Otherwise he'd give me this really betrayed look.” Sulu drinks from his cup and looks out the window again. Kirk stares at him, stunned.   
  
“I feel like I don't know him anymore,” Sulu says.   
  
“Yeah,” Kirk says, though he can't relate. He's come to know Chekov much better since he died, through Sulu, and he'd always felt like he knew Sam better than he really wanted to, something that didn't change when he was gone.   
  
“And I feel like,” Sulu says, stuttering the words out like he's saying this against his will, “Like I don't know myself anymore, because of that? Like, I think about the guy I was back then, and I fucking hate him, because I had everything, and I don't remember what that felt like.” He stares at Kirk, waiting for input.   
  
“Hey,” Kirk says. “I wish I even knew what it felt like to forget what that was like.”  
  
“No, you don't,” Sulu says. He seems like he wants to get pissed off, then it fades. He sighs into his cup.  
  
“It's like there's this other universe somewhere where he didn't die,” Sulu says. “This better, alternate universe, and I'm there, like, _most_ of me is there, and the part that's here is just this bankrupt piece of shit that congratulates himself for remembering to eat at least once a day.”  
  
Kirk grins without meaning to, charmed by that. He wants to be the guy who reminds Sulu to eat, or who congratulates him on remembering. He wants to sit with him at the end of the day, like they used to, and buzz with the incredible energy that it takes not to touch him.   
  
“You should come around sometime,” Kirk says. “If you want company.”  
  
“Jesus,” Sulu says. “Don't you get tired of – the sight of me? The way I am?”  
  
“No.” It's the truest thing Kirk has ever said, and it hurts, bad, deep in his chest. He will never get tired of the sight of Sulu, or tired of the way he is, and he knows now how Sulu can be sure that he'll never love anyone like he loved Chekov. There is an endlessness to feeling this way about someone that makes everything feel predetermined and plain.   
  
“Captain.” Sulu moans and leans back against the edge of the window, twirling his cup in his hand. “You've been great, really, but I'm not your responsibility. Not to this degree, anyway. Don't let me make you miserable.”   
  
“You don't make me miserable.” Kirk had been operating under the half-conscious assumption that Sulu knew he was in love with him, so this comes as a surprise. Sulu just rolls his eyes. He watches the stars for awhile, then smiles like he's sees someone he knows out there.  
  
“Do you remember the first time you went to space?” Sulu asks. “I mean, the first time you broke the atmosphere.”   
  
“School field trip,” Kirk says. He got sick just before they boarded the shuttle and didn't tell anyone. He was afraid his father was up there somewhere, dead in the incomplete way that people who die in space disappear but don't. He learned later that people who die on Earth are like that, too.   
  
“I went with my family when I was six,” Sulu says. “On vacation to some space station, I don't even remember which one it was.” Sulu is still looking at the stars, and still smiling like he knows something Kirk doesn't. “I got – this feeling in my chest when we broke the atmosphere, like I was remembering something amazing that I'd forgotten in a past life. I remember my face got really hot. I was embarrassed by how hopeful I felt about everything in that moment, like I thought my sisters and my parents would look at me and know. “  
  
He turns to look at Kirk, his mouth open like he's trying to decide if he should say the next part or not. Their knees are maybe three inches away from each other on the sill, and Kirk just wants to lie down on Sulu's chest and listen to his heartbeat, to hear it right up against his ear. He thinks he would be blown into a hundred million irretrievable particles if he did it, and he wants that, to touch Sulu and disappear. Like they're in a fairy tale and it's the one thing they can never do.   
  
“Pavel laughed when I told him that,” Sulu says. “It was sort of. The worst thing he ever did to me, but I don't think he knew. He – you should warn McCoy, like. Sometimes when you're that young you don't know how powerful you are, how much your opinion matters to people.”   
  
“I'll be sure to tell him that,” Kirk says. More than wanting to touch Sulu, he wants to know if he should. Nothing sweeping, just a friendly hand on his leg, but if Sulu went stiff or pushed him away Kirk would forget how to breathe.  
  
“Shore leave's coming up,” Kirk says when Sulu has been quiet for awhile. “Got any plans?”  
  
Sulu shakes his head slowly, staring down at his cup. His hands are still scarred in places, and Kirk is afraid he'll have fresh cuts after shore leave, but maybe he's gotten past that. Kirk is more afraid that Sulu will spend his shore leave with someone else, even if it's just a hooker who looks like Chekov.   
  
“Ullia's got good surfing, I hear,” Kirk says. He feels panicked about his own upcoming shore leave. Bones will be with Chapel, fighting or not, and Spock and Uhura are going on some kind of educational expedition in the jungle. Kirk will probably end up getting hammered with Scotty and Gaila most nights, but he wants Sulu there with him, so he won't feel like the third wheel, and because he always wants Sulu with him, everywhere he goes.   
  
“I never was very good at surfing,” Sulu says.  
  
“Really? I'm surprised.”  
  
“Why?” Sulu laughs, and it's so genuine and free of greater implications that Kirk is taken off guard.   
  
“'Cause,” Kirk says, barely able to think when Sulu smiles at him like that. “I don't know. You've got the right – body type for it, or something.”  
  
Sulu looks down at himself, then laughs again. He puts his cup to his lips and groans when he finds it empty.  
  
“Sometimes I still think I'm going to wake up and things will have gone back to normal,” he says. “But then I worry that I wouldn't know how to live in that world anymore, either.”   
  
“Are you worried about using during shore leave?” Kirk asks, desperate for a reason to room with him. Sulu looks hurt, and Kirk hates himself.   
  
“I wasn't until now,” Sulu says with a fake laugh. Kirk waves his hand through the air.  
  
“Don't listen to me,” he says. “I'm out of it.”   
  
“Long day.”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
The opportunity for anything meaningful is over, and they both get up at the same time. Kirk walks Sulu back to the party and then turns around to leave.   
  
“Hey,” Sulu calls. He's silhouetted in the rec room doorway, lights going crazy behind him, everybody dancing now. For a second Kirk thinks he's going to say, _What am I supposed to do in there without you?_  
  
“Maybe we can surf together next week,” Sulu says. “On shore leave.” He looks like he feels sorry for Kirk but still doesn't understand why.   
  
“Sure,” Kirk says. He waves and goes back to his room, where he allows himself to jerk off to thoughts of Sulu for the first time in awhile. Even in his fantasies he has to take Sulu by force because he's still in love with Chekov, but Sulu is always weeping with gratitude by the end. Kirk falls asleep after two unsatisfying orgasms and dreams that there's a mutiny. Spock is the only one who attempts to defend him, though Kirk senses his heart isn't really in it, and Sulu, suspiciously, is nowhere to be found.


	4. Chapter 4

Shore leave sneaks up on him, and he finds himself packing his bag with only a few minutes to make it to the shuttle. He hurries there, sure that he forgot something, and crashes into Bones on the way. Bones appears to be drunker than he has been in a long time, so Kirk takes him by the arm and helps him to the shuttle, trying not to attract attention.  
  
“Broke up,” Bones manages to slur. He laughs at himself. “Like I'm, what? Sixteen? People my age don't _break up_. They divorce! Like men!”  
  
“Bones, fuck,” Kirk mutters, trying to ignore the stares as he shoves Bones into a seat on the shuttle. “Keep it down.”  
  
“Aw, to hell with you, Jim,” Bones roars. He's got a flask in his hand but it appears to be mostly empty, only a few drips of whatever was in it flinging out as he gestures with it. “You're not the only one who gets to act like a child around here.”  
  
“I'll hypo you myself if you don't shut up,” Kirk says, sitting down beside Bones. “Bad reaction to an antibiotic!” he announces to the crew members who are staring. “You know the old doc, he's always got to – med up before he goes planet-side!”  
  
“King of bullshit, James T. Kirk,” Bones says, quietly now, and then he passes out.  
  
Ullia is ridiculously bright when they disembark, and the platform is swarming with aliens who are already trying to hawk tourist garbage, mangling Standard as they shove plastic things in everybody's faces. Bones is dead weight, but Kirk hauls him through the fray somehow, cursing him under his breath. When Bones suddenly gets a lot lighter, Kirk looks over and sees Sulu hoisting him up, draping Bones' other arm around his shoulders.   
  
“Who killed the doctor?” Sulu asks as they carry him toward the hotel.   
  
“Guess,” Kirk says.  
  
“Chapel.”  
  
“You got it.”  
  
They've all got separate rooms but they end up in Kirk's, Bones face down on the bed, asleep, and Kirk and Sulu drinking at the room's little desk, which has a fake marble top. Sulu is eating the ice out of his glass again, sucking on it and turning it over on his tongue. Kirk is thinking about that ice dying the perfect death, melting to nothing on Sulu's tongue, cold up until the very end, and then, finally, so warm. The sun is beginning to go down outside, which feels like an incredible mercy.  
  
“I was like this over Pavel,” Sulu says, looking over his shoulder at Bones. “You get like this. Well, most people do. You don't, I guess.”  
  
“But you and Pavel never broke up,” Kirk says, avoiding the question, if it even was one.   
  
“No, but I was afraid all the time that he would, that he would get sick of me. You don't know how people wanted him. I saw it in everybody's eyes, all the time, how they thought they could – teach this little genius how to feel good. They were all having that fantasy, everybody.”  
  
“Not me,” Kirk says. It's true, though in an objective sense he understood Chekov's appeal.  
  
“I know,” Sulu says. He grins. “Why do you think you're, like. My only friend?”  
  
For some reason, maybe because they're on vacation, they both laugh really hard at that, and Bones grunts in protest on the bed, which makes them laugh harder. They play cards and open the windows as the evening cools down. The waves are loud and threatening down on the beach, crashing with the high tide. Kirk is nervous about the prospect of letting Sulu get near them, especially if he's not very good at surfing. He frets about this and drinks more.  
  
“Wait,” Sulu says at one point, narrowing his eyes. “How old are you?”  
  
“Twenty-nine.”   
  
“Jesus.”   
  
“Why do you ask?”  
  
“I forget. Something to do with my own quarter-life crisis.”   
  
“Hey, that's a really good sign, actually,” Kirk says. “That you're thinking of your life in terms of four parts.”   
  
“Nah, I'm not really. Quarter-life crisis is just a convenient term for it.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“For feeling hopeless but also young.”  
  
“You want to hear another term for that? Teenage melodrama. I felt that way when I was fifteen.”  
  
“Yeah? How'd you get over it?”  
  
“Well, let's see. Actually, I didn't. Whoops.”  
  
It's the best time Kirk has had in awhile, maybe the best night of his life. People are shouting out on the beach, laughing into the wind. A cafe down the street is playing Neil Diamond, which seems impossible, but maybe it's just Ullian folk music that sounds like Neil Diamond. Bones shifts around on the bed, every sigh and snore a comforting reminder that Kirk and Sulu aren't actually alone together.   
  
“Have you ever played fire and ice?” Kirk asks, arranging the cards, giddy with what he's about to do.  
  
“No,” Sulu says. Of course he hasn't: he grew up with sisters, not an evil older brother.   
  
“Okay,” Kirk says, making his face serious the way drunks do when they've got something to hide. “The way you play is, I'll show you cards, and every time you see a black card you say, 'ice,' and every time you see a red card, you say 'fire.'”   
  
Sulu snorts. “What?”  
  
“Just – just go with it, it's kind of like a magic trick. Okay? Ready?”  
  
The first three cards are black, and Sulu says 'ice' each time, obediently, his innocent concentration on the task a little distracting. Finally, the red card: as soon as he says 'fire' Kirk sprays the whole deck into his face. They're drunk enough to find this hilarious, and Sulu tackles Kirk in retribution, but not as hard as Kirk hoped he would. They end up sitting on the floor in a pile of playing cards, Sulu holding the front of Kirk's shirt with both hands.  
  
“That's like interrupting starfish,” Sulu says.   
  
“Huh?”  
  
“My – okay, you know, it's like, when people are trying to do stuff, and – interrupting starfish!” He opens one hand and thrusts it toward Kirk's face, which startles him more than it should, but he forgives himself and falls backward onto the carpet, laughing.  
  
“So that was a sister trick,” Kirk says. “Mine was a brother trick.”   
  
“Yeah,” Sulu agrees, and he lies down beside Kirk. “Pavel was an only child. I was like, always trying to figure out what that meant about him, you know, in a more profound way than the obvious? But the fact is, he was just really spoiled, and happier for it. Like, it didn't ruin him.”  
  
“But, wait, Hikaru.” Kirk rolls toward him and dares to poke his shoulder. “You said – without your sisters around, your parents would have, like, you would have hated it –”  
  
“Oh, sure, sure.” Sulu turns toward Kirk, his legs sliding forward, just short of touching his knees to Kirk's thigh. If Bones regained consciousness now Kirk would be fucked, but that's not going to happen until morning.  
  
“I don't mean I should have been an only child,” Sulu says. “'Cause I would have been a totally different person if I was. It's like – the souls who were meant to be born to parents who will have only one child find their way there, and the rest of us, we, like, don't. You know?”  
  
Kirk laughs, but he does know. He scoots forward, though he knows he's not going to get kissed. Sulu is happy, too, he can tell.  
  
“You believe in souls?” Kirk says, so in love with Sulu that his eyes actually water, but Sulu isn't prone to noticing such things, especially when they're lying on the floor together in a dark room, so he doesn't worry too much about it.   
  
“Yeah,” Sulu says, frowning.  
  
“Me, too,” Kirk says before Sulu can get defensive.  
  
“Why?” Sulu says, like he's not sure he wants to believe in souls if Kirk does, too.   
  
“Because I have one,” Kirk says, and Sulu smiles in a way that makes Kirk think, for almost three full seconds, that he might actually get kissed after all.   
  
“Yeah,” Sulu says, softly. “Exactly.”  
  
They fall asleep like that, on the floor, and in the middle of the night Kirk scoots closer, just by an inch, just short of touching their noses together. He can feel Sulu's breath, and the heat of it warms him as the air through the window above them gets cooler. He wakes up a short time later feeling anxious and terrified, trying to remember all the things he did and said and wondering if Sulu will remember them and hold them against him. He catapults himself into the bathroom and splashes water onto his face, wishing he knew where his toothbrush was. His teeth feel mossy and he looks about fifty years old in the harsh lights over the bathroom mirror.   
  
When he goes back out in the dark room he's not really sure what to do. Bones is sprawled across the bed, snoring loudly. Sulu is curled up on the floor, one hand spread open on the carpet and the other tucked under his cheek. Kirk wants to hurt whoever made him need this thing that he can't have, not just now but always. His father, his brother, his mother: none of them were available when it came to loving him back in a way that mattered, and he always had to be okay with accepting that. He crawls down onto the floor, groaning and feeling vaguely ill, just sick enough to be uncomfortable in his skin. Sulu sighs in his sleep and turns onto his stomach, both arms hidden under his chest now. Kirk watches his face and thinks about the softness of his cheeks.   
  
“Captain,” Sulu murmurs, out of nowhere, like suddenly they're living in the same universe.   
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“Oh.” Sulu tugs one arm from beneath his chest and thumps his hand against Kirk's cheek. “Just. Wasn't sure if you were there.”  
  
“I'm here,” Kirk says, his eyes getting wet again. Fuck this, fuck everything, because when the sun comes up what's happening now will be worse than over. It will be remembered and resented. Sulu's fingers move on Kirk's cheek in half-asleep twitches, and Kirk's angry tears run over the bridge of his nose, down onto the carpet. Sulu's eyes are closed.  
  
Kirk stays awake for as long as he can, and eventually Sulu's hand slides from his face. Bones gets up at one point, stumbles into the bathroom and takes a five minute long piss. When he comes back out, Kirk has moved away from Sulu, rolled onto his side with his head under the desk. Bones doesn't offer any indication that he's noticed either of them, just falls into the bed again.   
  
The sun comes up and Kirk is awake to see it, sitting in the desk chair, his arms folded on the fake marble and his head resting on them. He's cold, from the fake marble and the breeze through the window. It occurs to him that Sulu might be cold, too, so he gets a blanket from the bed and puts it over him.   
  
“Jim?” Bones says, sitting up in bed and sounding a little terrified.  
  
“Everything's fine,” Kirk tells him, and Sulu moans softly in his sleep, as if to disagree.   
  
As soon as they sun is up they all go down to the cafe that was playing Neil Diamond the night before and eat breakfast in silence. Kirk and Sulu are both ravenous, finishing plates of pancakes and mysterious sausage, biscuits and eggs, and Bones mostly drinks coffee. Kirk is starting to feel hopeful again, maybe because of the food, or the soft confusion on Sulu's face, the sudden lack of accusation. He seems worried about Bones, which is adorable. Kirk has seen much worse when it comes to Bones and women.  
  
“Does anybody know where my PADD is?” Bones finally says, muttering, and this is like permission for Kirk and Sulu to start talking, too.   
  
“Probably on the ship,” Kirk says. “Probably full of messages from Chapel, begging for you to take her back.”  
  
Bones gives him a hateful look and Kirk grins, his cheeks full of pancakes. Bones retaliates by looking back and forth between Kirk and Sulu, slow and deliberate. Kirk shrugs like he's got nothing to hide, which, where Bones is concerned, is true.  
  
“Me and Kirk are going to surf today,” Sulu says.  
  
“Maybe,” Kirk says, and then he worries that he's come off as not necessarily wanting to spend the day with Sulu as opposed to not wanting Sulu in any kind of danger that isn't Federation mandated.  
  
“That's terrific, kids,” McCoy says. “I'm going to pass out in a gutter and die. You two have a nice time.”   
  
Bones goes back to Kirk's room after breakfast, and Kirk doesn't bother to remind him that he has a room of his own somewhere. He changes into his swim suit and a t-shirt that says Old Crow Medicine Show on the front, something he found at a flea market on the Curilian space station during the first year of this mission. He doesn't know what the words mean, but it's his lucky t-shirt, worthy of a day like today. Bones grunts in an attention-demanding way before Kirk can make it out the door.  
  
“Hey,” Bones says. “Look at me. You want to end up like this?”  
  
“It's not like that,” Kirk says. “He's – I might as well be a particularly entertaining grapefruit, as far he's concerned. It's not romantic at all, not on his end. He doesn't see me like that.”   
  
“Yeah, right,” Bones says, and then he mumbles something into the mussed blankets on the bed.  
  
“What was that?”  
  
“I said, if you're a grapefruit, he looks at you like he wants to cut you in half, cover you with sugar, and eat you for breakfast.”  
  
“Bones.” If it were possible to die of being pierced by sudden hope, Kirk would be in a heap on the floor.  
  
“Don't get all excited,” Bones says, lifting his face from the bed to glower at Kirk. “You might get sugared and eaten but you're still gonna get cut in half.”  
  
The truth is, Kirk hasn't really had any experience with this. He's protected himself from it, mostly because he knew that if he let himself fall in love with someone it would turn out like this: second fiddle to a ghost, panicked at the thought of touching the object of his affection with even the slightest brush of his fingers, sleepless with doubt. Still, he'd volunteer to be cut in half a thousand times as he comes to the bottom of the stairs in the lobby and sees Sulu waiting for him, wearing flip flops, board shorts, and a faded green t-shirt with a frayed collar. Probably his lucky t-shirt, too. He smiles when he sees Kirk coming.  
  
“Is Bones okay?” Sulu asks as they head toward the front doors.   
  
“Oh, sure,” Kirk says. “He's tougher than he looks.”  
  
“He looks pretty tough.”  
  
“Precisely.”  
  
They walk down to the beach, marveling at the fact that they're not more hungover and discussing the details of the previous evening that they remember. Kirk actually remembers all of it, but doesn't say so.   
  
“I can't believe I did fire and ice on you,” he says when they're sitting on the beach, watching the bright green sea birds and waiting for their breakfast to digest.  
  
“That's okay,” Sulu says, mercifully not making a joke about how dirty _did fire and ice on you_ sounds. “I interrupting starfished you, I think.”  
  
“That sounds filthy,” Kirk says, unable to stop himself. Sulu smirks.   
  
“Everyone thinks we're fucking,” Sulu says. “It's so stupid.”  
  
“Extremely stupid.”  
  
“Like nobody can be friends with you without getting fucked. Me and Pavel used to think that you and Bones were a couple, actually.”   
  
“Yeah?” Kirk says, not sure how he feels about the fact that Sulu and Chekov once discussed who he might be fucking. It's true that most people think he's fucking everybody, and sometimes he actually is, but not always. A court-appointed therapist once told him that he was trying to “control sex” in an unhealthy way. Kirk has been trying to figure out what that means ever since, and most of the time he thinks it doesn't really mean anything, that the therapist couldn't have even explained it himself, or he would have.  
  
“Sorry,” Sulu says suddenly, and Kirk looks over at him. He thinks of the way Sulu looked when they were lying on the floor together the night before, like a kid at a slumber party, ready to talk about anything, unfamiliar with cynicism.   
  
“For what?”  
  
“I don't know. For thinking you and Bones were fucking, I guess. For thinking that people can't be close without having sex, too.”   
  
Kirk looks out at the ocean, which has that new, washed-clean look that every ocean he's ever seen has always seemed to possess in the early morning, before it's choked with tourists and blanketed with heat. He wants to interpret what Sulu just said as an expression of their closeness, but he keeps getting snagged on the fact that he'll never have sex with Sulu, which was something he was okay with even twenty-four hours ago. Now it feels like a death sentence.   
  
“Fuck,” Kirk says. “We forgot to bring sunscreen.”  
  
They rent only one surfboard, and Kirk ponders the significance of this, eventually realizing that it was mostly his decision. More people arrive on the beach, many of them _Enterprise_ alphas on shore leave. Sulu puts the surfboard on the sand and teaches Kirk the basics, making him lie on it on his stomach and pretend to paddle out past the waves.  
  
“Those waves look pretty serious,” Kirk says, staring out at them while he fake-paddles.  
  
“What did you do for fun, growing up landlocked like that?” Sulu asks. “Other than pretending to die in a lake.”  
  
Kirk smiles. So Sulu remembers more than he lets on, too.   
  
“Sex and drugs,” Kirk says. “Well, in my case, alcohol.” Trying drugs would have been the equivalent of knifing his mother in the heart, even the mostly harmless ones that everybody did.   
  
“I mean before that,” Sulu says, and Kirk feels bad, because it's too early to talk gravely about the past.  
  
“Four wheeling,” Kirk says. “Cow tipping. Sometimes fireworks. Also, there were these huge silos with tiny ladders up to the top for the engineers, and we would dare each other to climb them. Sam was the only one I knew who ever actually did it. I was seven years old, and everyone made fun of me for crying and telling my mom. They had to rescue him with hovercraft and everything. He kicked my ass for getting him in trouble, but I could tell he was actually pretty grateful.”  
  
“God,” Sulu says. “I wouldn't have survived a brother.” He flinches like he's afraid he said the wrong thing, maybe because Kirk's brother didn't survive. Kirk sits up on the surf board, straddling it.  
  
“So you surfed, I guess,” Kirk says. “For fun, as a kid?”  
  
“My sisters did. I would go with them. Meiko was pretty serious about it. You ready to try it?”  
  
“Yeah, but one question: why fencing? Where did that come from?”  
  
Sulu grins. “I wanted to hit people with swords. My parents made me channel that into something with rules and pads and trophies.”   
  
“Gotcha.”  
  
The water has a slippery quality and Kirk can't decide if it's familiar or new. He's been in approximately fifteen oceans on twelve planets. It's a big deal to him, because he didn't see one in person until he was ten years old. He saw space before he saw an ocean.   
  
They swim out together and Sulu tries to get Kirk on the board, holding it for him, but neither of them really knows what they're doing. They get knocked around by the waves and almost lose the board twice, laughing breathlessly at how pathetic the force of the ocean makes them feel. A crane flies by overhead and they both watch it go, then get smashed in the back of their heads by a wave. Kirk comes up choking on salt water and Sulu curses as he rubs it out of his eyes.   
  
“This burns worse than the last ocean I was in,” Sulu says, starting to sound ornery. Kirk wonders if they were still drunk this morning and are just now coming in to their hangovers. He feels a little nauseous.  
  
“Help me do this, man,” Kirk says, sliding onto the board again. “People are watching.”  
  
He stands up a couple of times, but that's as far as he gets. Sulu is better, but not by much. They start getting competitive and annoyed with each other as the swimming wears them out, and by the time they're pushing the board toward shore they're both panting for breath. It must be lunch time, or maybe there was a shark, because the beach has emptied out a little. Sulu flops onto his back in the hard sand at the water's edge, and Kirk slumps down beside him, raking his eyes over Sulu's body, wanting Sulu's hard nipples in his mouth so badly that he can feel them between his teeth, the tiny wrinkles on his tongue and the salt of Sulu's skin in contrast with the salt of the water. Sulu is looking at Kirk, too, and Kirk remembers a girl he had sex with at the Academy telling him that he's extremely fuckable when he's out of breath. His bathing suit is pretty small, and Sulu has to have noticed his bulge, that old claim to fame.  
  
“I'm out of shape,” Sulu says, and this gives Kirk a marvelous excuse to look him over again. Sulu is pretty cut, with a slight softness at his belly that makes Kirk want to bury his face against it. He doesn't know what to say; he feels like if he even opens his mouth he'll just end up kissing Sulu, who looks like he needs it, and like he'll burst into tears if Kirk tries anything.   
  
“Surfing sucks just as much as I remembered,” Sulu says. “It's like, you're just – at the mercy of this enormous thing. Even if you do well, it's part luck.”  
  
“I'm exhausted,” Kirk says, his voice coming out unrecognizably smug, the way it does when he's trying hard not to say what he's thinking. “Let's sleep for the rest of the day.”  
  
“In the sun, though,” Sulu says.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
They have mystery meat burgers at a restaurant with a deck that overlooks the beach. Everything is a weird approximation of Earth, the aliens trying too hard to make the vacationers feel like they never left home. Kirk is charmed by their attempt at ketchup, which is just mashed up tomatoes. After eating, they go back to the beach and stretch out on towels, the surfboard lying beside them like a third sunbather.   
  
“Wonder how Bones is doing,” Sulu says when they're both lying on their stomachs, facing away from the ocean, toward the dunes. Kirk should really be checking his PADD, but it's been quiet so far, folded inside his Old Crow t-shirt to shield it from the sun.   
  
“Bones'll be alright,” Kirk says. He's fantasizing about Sulu even now, while he lies next to him in the sun with the waves crashing behind them like a taunt. He's thinking about those nipples, the curve of his back, wondering if his ass is paler than the rest of his skin. He's set something loose in himself and he's never going to get it back in its cage. Every time Sulu lifts his head to blink at him sleepily Kirk feels like sobbing out a confession. He tries to arrange himself in attractive poses, bending his legs and spreading his knees when he's on his back, moaning and stretching gratuitously when he's on his stomach.   
  
“Honestly, I don't care if people think we're fucking,” Sulu announces when Kirk is in the middle of an excellent fantasy about sucking Sulu's cock in the shower when they get back to the hotel. “Maybe if they think that they'll stop trying to set me up with people.”  
  
“Trying to set you up with people?” Kirk lifts his head and squints over at Sulu, who is up on his elbows now, his hair drying in a comical fashion. “Who's doing that?”  
  
“Some girls in the botany lab,” Sulu says. He's digging in the sand with his fingers, and it's making Kirk hard against his towel, the sight of Sulu's fingers making holes in the sand. “They're worried that I'm depressed, or they were, toward the end of last year. They try to introduce me to these twinky little guys, like that's my type or something.”   
  
“Jesus,” Kirk says, enraged. “Well. If you want me as your beard, that's fine.”  
  
“But what about you?” Sulu asks, giving him a pathetic look, almost a pout. “You – people won't – if they think –”  
  
“I'm on hiatus anyway,” Kirk says.   
  
“'Cause of me?”  
  
“No.” Kirk is too sun-baked to be having this conversation.   
  
“Why, then?”  
  
Kirk sighs and rolls onto his back. He drapes an arm over his eyes and tries to come up with an answer, feeling Sulu's eyes on him, hoping that he's sneaking glances at the bulge until he remembers that he's half-hard and crosses one leg across the other to hide it.   
  
“I've just been too busy,” he says.  
  
“Not in your rec hours, though,” Sulu says. “All you do is fuck around with me.”  
  
“Look,” Kirk says sharply, mortally wounded. “This is like your fourth or fifth attempt to get rid of me, right, so why don't you just say it?”  
  
“Say _what_?” Sulu is angry now, too, glaring at him.   
  
“That you don't want to hang around me so much,” Kirk says. “That I'm – burdening you with my – whatever. Attention.”  
  
“Kirk.” Sulu puts his head down on his towel again and gives Kirk the sweetest, most open look that Kirk has ever seen on his face, making him feel guilty and dirty in comparison. “Bones might be your best friend, but you're mine, okay? You know that, right?”  
  
Kirk is going to die of wanting him, right here, on his back in the sand, but he just nods, though he didn't know that.   
  
“I just don't – I mean, it's been over a year since Pavel died. You don't have to keep watching out for me or whatever. I'm okay.”  
  
“Don't worry about me,” Kirk says. “I do what I want.”  
  
Sulu laughs, so Kirk does, too, and the moment passes. Kirk can feel his skin starting to burn, but it feels good, something he can take back to the ship with him, better than sand in his ass crack.   
  
“You know, it could be kind of fun,” Sulu says. “Making people think we're sleeping together. Feeding the rumors. It could be like our inside joke.”   
  
“Yeah.” Fun like a knife in Kirk's heart.   
  
“Bones doesn't think we're fucking, does he?”  
  
“No.” Kirk feels the wave building in his chest, and he's at its mercy, it's going to break. “He just thinks I'm in love with you.”  
  
“God. Why?”  
  
“Why? Really, Hikaru?” Kirk isn't sure what he's saying. His eyes are closed against the sun, and some children are laughing down by the water. The day is fading fast, dangerously so. Kirk can smell rain in the air, though the clouds haven't arrived yet.   
  
“Did you tell Bones he's wrong?” Sulu asks. Kirk holds his breath for awhile, trying to decide if he has a lot or nothing to lose here.   
  
“You can't tell Bones anything,” Kirk says. “He thinks he's got everybody all figured out. Hence his troubles with women. They don't appreciate being diagnosed.”   
  
He keeps his eyes closed, waiting for Sulu to say something else. When he hears Sulu shuffling around on his towel, he looks over and sees that he's sitting up, looking dejected.   
  
“Oh, c'mon,” Kirk says, reaching over to touch the small of Sulu's back, which is warm and damp from the towel, dusted with sand. Sulu won't look at him. Kirk isn't sure that he knows what's happening, only that it would be dangerous to assume that he does.   
  
“We should go in,” Sulu says, chickening out, though Kirk still isn't sure what he wouldn't let himself say, so maybe he should be relieved. He sits up with a groan, and for awhile they both stare at the ocean, which is getting treacherous again, the tide changing.   
  
“I'll say it out loud if you want me to,” Kirk says, hoping that they're on the same page.   
  
“No,” Sulu says, so they must be. “Don't.”  
  
They retire to their separate rooms to shower, muttering vaguely about getting dinner together later. Bones isn't in the room when Kirk gets there, so he falls to his knees and jerks off onto the carpet, punishing his cock, thinking about Sulu in the shower, soap sliding over his darkened skin. It takes him a long time to come and he screams when he does, only remembering that the windows are open when he hears laughter on the boardwalk below. He takes the longest shower he's ever had in his life, his skin on fire with sunburn.  
  
When he comes out of the bathroom the sun is blazing through the windows. He dries off without closing the curtains, kind of hoping someone will look up and see him. For an hour he lies on the bed and reads his PADD messages. There's nothing that requires his immediate attention, which is a disappointment. The only personal message is from Bones.   
  
_I'm not dead. Don't come looking for me unless you really need to. I've still got a bad feeling about the pilot. The way he's been lately is like the calm before the storm or something. Trust me on this. Or don't. I get the feeling he's hustling you, like he's better at what he's doing than he wants you to know._  
  
The message ends there, but there's another one:  
  
 _Shit, don't listen to me. I'm a bitter old man. Like that's news to you. Enjoy yourself._  
  
Kirk reads both messages several times, then sends one to Sulu:  
  
 _Hungry?_  
  
He gets no response, and wonders if he should have been more specific. He types, _I was talking about food, ha ha_ , but deletes the message without sending it.   
  
There's a half-empty bottle of vodka on the desk, from the night before. Kirk walks naked across the room and lifts the vodka bottle toward the ceiling.  
  
“Hey, Chekov,” he says, feeling trashed already. “Here's to you.”  
  
An hour later, he's wasted and there's still no response from Sulu, so he gets dressed and goes out. He runs into Ensign York and Ensign Oliva in the lobby, and Ensign York is clearly trying to put the moves on Ensign Oliva, so Kirk runs interference on his game. It's too easy. York is nerdy and pretentious, prone to night terrors, and Oliva is giddy in Kirk's presence, pressing closer when he throws a casual arm around her shoulders as he finishes a joke. She invites him to join them for dinner, and Kirk can almost see the steam pouring out of York's ears.   
  
York disappears at some point. Oliva doesn't seem to mind that Kirk is drunk. She might be drunk, too, but who can tell? Kirk sees a lot of people he knows and they all seem glad to find him in this state, like old times, before he started locking himself in his room with Sulu every night. Kirk is halfway back to Iowa on the way up to his room with Oliva, who is blurring into twins in the elevator. He thinks of high school and nights like this, when he got to live outside of himself for awhile. Everyone he encountered seemed to appreciate the phenomenon, not having to really deal with him, as if any of them ever actually had. He would wake up in somebody's corn field and find pieces of dried leaves inside his boxers, stuck to his sweaty thighs.   
  
“Where's Sulu?” Oliva asks as she's taking off her bra.  
  
“No telling,” Kirk says. “None of my business.”  
  
“I thought he was your boyfriend?”  
  
“Me too,” Kirk says. He picks up his PADD and squints at it for awhile, trying to figure out why he can't access his inbox. Oliva is naked on the bed when he looks up, and he knows he'll never get hard for her, not while he's drunk like this, not while her nipples aren't the same color as Sulu's.   
  
“Oh, shit,” Kirk says, blinking rapidly. “I think this is against protocol.”  
  
“Are you kidding me?” She spreads her legs. “C'mon, God. I'll never get to sleep if I don't come.”   
  
So they make out, and Kirk fingers her until she's clenching around him, moaning and shaking through her orgasm. He washes his hands in the bathroom sink and cuts his foot on part of the vodka bottle, which apparently he broke at some point. Oliva is asleep when he returns to the bed, and he curls around her, holding her close and pretending that she's Sulu, though her skin smells all wrong, like tequila and apple-scented body spray.  
  
In the morning, someone is pounding on his door and there's a girl in his bed. He takes a moment to remember who the girl is: Ensign Oliva, alpha shift on the communications floor, likes to sing karaoke at crew parties. He feels tenderly for her in the dizzying morning light, and covers her with a blanket before pulling on his jeans and going to answer the door.   
  
It's Sulu. “Didn't you get my messages?” he asks, shouting, agitated.   
  
“I tried,” Kirk says, squinting. “My PADD's broken.” It's actually stuck on a settings screen that he couldn't figure out how to exit last night. He's happy that Sulu is here, in a tizzy over being ignored, but, then again, there's the girl in his bed.   
  
“What the hell happened to your foot?” Sulu asks, looking down at it. There's blood all over the carpet, and Kirk acknowledges the pain only when he looks down and sees that his foot is crusted with blood, too.   
  
“Oh, yeah,” he says, wanting to lie down somewhere cool and quiet, to let Sulu stroke his sweaty hair from his forehead. “Stepped in some glass. It's okay.”  
  
“Is somebody in there?” Sulu asks, looking over Kirk's shoulder. Oliva's sun dress is on the floor in the hallway. Sulu looks more worried than betrayed, but Kirk isn't in the mood to be forgiven.   
  
“Just this girl,” Kirk says. “I cock-blocked York. I think it had something to do with him asking for Chekov's room last year. So. You're welcome.”   
  
Sulu stares at him in confusion, his lips open around something he seems to have decided not to say, then walks away. Kirk doesn't have the heart to watch him go or try to stop him, so he shuts the door quietly. He goes to his PADD, exits the setting page and checks his inbox. Three new messages from Sulu.   
  
_Sorry, I fell asleep after we got back from the beach_ , the first one says. _Where do you want to meet?_ The second one asks if he's there, and the third says that Sulu came to his room and knocked, got no answer, and is starting to worry.   
  
Kirk gets in the shower and cleans his foot as well as he can. When he comes out Oliva is sitting up in bed, holding the blankets over her naked breasts and blinking slowly, looking too young to be here.   
  
“You alright?” Kirk asks, handing her a bottle of water. She takes it and drinks, sneaking embarrassed looks at him.  
  
“Captain,” she says, her voice wavering. “I'm so sorry.”  
  
“Hey, hey.” He sits beside her on the bed and lets her crumple against his chest to hide her face. “You didn't do anything wrong,” he says, smoothing her messy hair. “It's my fault. But don't worry – we didn't even – do much. Mostly just kissed.”   
  
“Oh, thank God,” she says, pulling back. “I really like you, sir, but I – I don't think this is a good idea.”   
  
“Agreed, Ensign.”  
  
When she's gone, Kirk spends the rest of the day in bed, not really sleeping. His PADD is on the mattress beside him, and every half hour or so he gets an official communication from the ship, nonessential updates and status reports. He reads all of them, looking for secret messages from Sulu within them. Eventually, he messages Bones.  
  
 _You around? I eliminated the middleman and cut myself in half to save Sulu the trouble._  
  
Bones responds immediately; he always seems to know when Kirk is having a true emergency.  
  
 _Figured you might. I'll be right down. Please be fully clothed when I arrive._  
  
 _I'll do what I can_ , Kirk sends back, just to be a smart ass. He drags himself out of bed and puts on clean underwear, a new pair of jeans, and his Old Crow Medicine Show shirt, for luck. He forgot to wear it last night, which seems as good an excuse as any for what happened.   
  
Bones shows up looking as if he's returned to the land of the living and holding two cups of coffee. Kirk steps out of the way so he can come inside, but Bones just frowns and lingers in the doorway.  
  
“What's going on with this blood?” he asks.   
  
“Nobody died,” Kirk says.   
  
“Kind of smells like death in there,” Bones says, wrinkling his nose. “How about we do this out on the beach? You look like you could use airing out.”  
  
“You're the doctor,” Kirk says. He slides on his flip flops and follows Bones out of the room, not bothering to lock the door.  
  
They walk down to the beach, which doesn't seem as clean as it did yesterday. Kirk blames himself, for having touched it, and decides he deserves the sand that's stinging the cut on his foot. He's overly careful as he walks on the sand, as if some of it might suck him down into a sinkhole. There's no telling, even on a tourist planet like this. Aliens will hide whatever they have to in order to get Federation business.   
  
“So what happened?” Bones asks when they're drinking their coffee and watching the ocean. Kirk wonders if Sulu went back to the ship, if he's in that room that used to be Chekov's, pawing through that box.   
  
“I think I sort of told him everything yesterday,” Kirk says. “On the beach. He was joking around, like we should make people think we're fucking, like we should play it up. I didn't really get why that would be funny, but it seemed like the right time to tell him that you think I'm in love with him.”  
  
“Great,” Bones mutters. “Like it was all my idea.”  
  
“So he pressed me, which I didn't expect, asking me if I'd told you I didn't actually love him. I dodged the question in a pretty obvious way, then he got all morose, like I'd hurt his feelings by not cutting my heart of my chest and handing it to him right there. I told him I'd say it out loud if he wanted me to, and I'm pretty sure he knew what I meant, because he said no like he would hit me if I tried it. Then he disappeared and I tried to bang this ensign, couldn't, and ended up just helping her rub one out. Sulu showed up at the door in the morning while she was still passed out in my bed. I said something weird about Chekov and Sulu got the hell out of Dodge. The end.”  
  
He waits for Bones to prescribe some course of action. They both sip their coffee, Bones with his eyes slightly narrowed as he considers his diagnosis.   
  
“It's probably for the best,” Bones says.   
  
“How the fuck can you say that?” Kirk asks. “I love him.”   
  
“Love,” Bones says with a scoff, and Kirk remembers who he's talking to.   
  
“Have you made peace with Chapel?” Kirk asks. “This is exactly what Spock was worried about, you know.”   
  
“You really want to go down that road, Jim? Things happening just like people's friends warned them they would? Really?”  
  
“No, but you could answer my question.”  
  
“I won't rub your mistake in your face if you extend me the same courtesy,” Bones says. “Let's just leave it at that.”   
  
“Sulu wasn't a mistake,” Kirk says. “If that's what you're referring to.” He sits up a little straighter, tired of regressing and feeling sorry for himself. He worked pretty hard to stop being that guy, once.   
  
“I'll fix it,” Kirk says. “It's not like we were together or anything. It's not even like I fucked the girl, though he won't believe that. I can apologize for the dumb comment about Chekov. I'm allowed one of those once in awhile, aren't I? Haven't I put in the time?”  
  
“That kid seems like some fairy tale character now,” Bones says sadly. “He'd get all red-cheeked whenever he came in for his exams. I once gave him this look when he'd itched one of his cuts open in his sleep and I thought he would faint.”  
  
“He was afraid of you,” Kirk says, smiling at the memory. “When you walked into a room he'd step a little closer to Sulu. Or me, if Sulu wasn't available.” How had Kirk forgotten this? He'd wanted to protect Chekov, it had been pretty intense. He didn't like to send Chekov on away missions or let him talk to hostile aliens if he had the conn. He felt bad enough even sending him to sick bay to face Bones. Once, a diplomat on Yrista slapped Chekov in the face for some innocently inappropriate comment, and Kirk was halfway across the room to kick the guy's ass, but Sulu got there first, which was for the best, since Kirk was the captain and could pretend to the diplomat that Sulu would be punished back on the ship.   
  
Kirk feels less confident about his plan of action after spending some time thinking about Chekov. He thanks Bones for the coffee and goes back to the hotel, not surprised to find that Sulu has checked out. Gaila is hanging around in the lobby, drinking something fruity with a little umbrella.   
  
“Looking for your boyfriend?” she says.   
  
“I wish everyone would stop trying to get involved,” Kirk says, wanting to steal her drink.   
  
“So give us an official order not to,” Gaila says, winking. Kirk used to love fucking her. She was so fun and undemanding, and then she fell in love with him, for some reason. He still feels bad when he sees her around, like he owes her money or something. He wonders if Sulu feels that way about him, but he's pretty sure that he doesn't. Yesterday, on the beach, Sulu wanted to kiss him, too. In hindsight it seems obvious, though Kirk is still cautious about thinking anything will come of it.  
  
He goes back to the ship a day early, but doesn't look for Sulu. He cleans his quarters by hand and gets a lot of work done, fleshing out bare bones reports that he hurried through and making diplomatic video calls ahead of schedule, charming three different species before lunchtime. When he sleeps, he lulls himself under by allowing himself to imagine going to Sulu's room, taking him by the hand and leading him to a neutral place on the ship, someplace far from that room with its ghosts, stroking his cheeks and kissing him deeply. The fantasy grows more sexual as it continues, Sulu naked on his knees in Kirk's bed, arching as Kirk pulls him back onto his cock, fucking him from behind, able to see Sulu's anguished pleasure in wraparound views in the daydream, but then he falls asleep, and his actual dreams are far less pleasant, all about Ensign Oliva somehow getting alien-impregnated by his fingers and crying, asking him why he doesn't love her.   
  
He wakes up feeling like a failure all over again and tries to comfort himself with the memories of the work he got done yesterday. Productivity has always made him feel better about whatever else came before. It's the reason he achieved genius-level status in high school: he would read like an addict on a binge when he needed to escape from whatever else was going on, and what he found in facts and mathematics and even history made a lot more sense than his day to day dealings.  
  
The alpha-shift shore leave is over in five hours. Kirk wanders the ship, talks with a few people in the mess over a bowl of corn chowder, flashes Ensign York an apologetic smile, and checks the gym to see if Sulu is fencing in public again. He's not; he's nowhere to be found.  
  
 _Hey_ , Kirk sends when he's back in his rooms, using his PADD. _I'm back on ship. Come by when you get a chance._ He's decided that he's tired of treating Sulu as if he's some delicate fae creature who must be danced around. The telling people what to do stuff has worked in the past, and Sulu seems like someone who needs direction.  
  
He gets no response. He could order Sulu to come, technically, but he doesn't.   
  
Sulu doesn't show his face until alpha shift. Kirk sort of corners him when he's coming off the lift, and Sulu is going to jerk away, maybe, but Kirk can pull rank on him here, back in the real world, or the unreal one, whichever.   
  
“So would it be weird to ask you if you got _my_ message?” Kirk says. He feels panicked, like everyone is watching, but they're all at least pretending to pay attention to their stations, shift change chit-chat going on behind him.  
  
“I got it,” Sulu says. He looks kind of ragged, like he hasn't slept. Kirk doesn't know how he can sleep in that old room of Chekov's anyway. He hates the thought of Sulu in there, alone.   
  
“I just haven't had a chance to come by,” Sulu says. He looks longingly at the conn, then back to Kirk. “You're sunburned,” he says.  
  
“Oh, yeah.” Kirk touches his face. “That's okay. It was worth it.”  
  
Sulu rolls his eyes and walks off, and for some reason this makes Kirk feel better. It's a boring shift, a straightforward warp to the next galaxy on their schedule, and Kirk makes Spock tell him about the tour he took with Uhura. He stares at Sulu while Spock rattles off the names of all the alien species they saw. It's the kind of thing Sulu would have liked: plants and flowers, all that hiking. Kirk is surprised he didn't go, and he nurses a theory that Sulu skipped it so they could be together.  
  
“So,” Kirk says when he throws his tray down beside Sulu's in the mess. “Some shore leave, huh?”  
  
“I guess.” Sulu is picking at some ziti, and Kirk wishes he'd gotten that, too, instead of a roast beef sandwich. He wishes Sulu were his boyfriend so he could fork some of it into his mouth without asking. That's the kind of thing he needs from Sulu, not just sex and spooning. Somehow it's the hardest thing to imagine actually getting: permission to touch Sulu's stuff and eat off his plate.   
  
“Listen,” Kirk says quietly, leaning toward him. “I'm sorry about – what I said, when you came to the door. That was stupid.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“About Ensign York. And Chekov's room.”  
  
Sulu looks over at Kirk and frowns. He's hunched, and he seems smaller than usual, or like he's nursing a wound under his shirt. Kirk glances at Sulu's hands and almost shouts out loud when he sees that he's got white bandages wrapped around four of his fingers on his right hand. His knuckles are bruised.  
  
“What happened to your hand?” Kirk asks, staring.   
  
“Same thing that happened to your foot, I guess.”  
  
“Okay.” Kirk scoffs, and tries to return the angry look Sulu is giving him, then lets his eyebrows arch when he can't pull it off.   
  
“Hey,” Kirk says. “Come to my room after your shift, okay?”  
  
“Why?” Sulu glares at the bowl of ziti. Kirk wants to taste it on Sulu's mouth later, the replicated tomatoes and the powdered parmesan.   
  
“Why not?” Kirk replies, and he looks up when he hears a tray smacking to the table across from him. It's Christine Chapel, and she doesn't look happy. She's got nothing but a cinnamon bun and a banana on her tray.   
  
“Hey, there,” Kirk says, putting on his captain smile. “What's –”  
  
“I need to request a shift transfer,” she says. “Sir.”   
  
“Oh?” Kirk looks over at Sulu's hands again, then back to Chapel. “But you're my head alpha shift nurse. I need you –”  
  
“Sir, I believe you're aware of the relationship between Dr. McCoy and myself,” she says, and Kirk is kind of afraid of her. Something about the softness of her features makes that look of anger all the more intimidating.  
  
“Uh-huh.”   
  
“Well, it has – ended, and I fear that in continuing to work together –” She stops talking, staring at the door of the mess. Kirk turns to see Bones coming in. He seems to be grumbling to himself, and he goes for coffee, passing by the line for food. He sees Kirk sitting with Chapel and frowns. Sulu gets up with his tray as Bones heads toward them.  
  
“Where are you going?” Kirk asks, not wanting to be left alone with these two.  
  
“Back to the bridge,” Sulu says.   
  
“But – you barely ate anything –”  
  
“Later, Captain.”   
  
Kirk spends the rest of his lunch break trying to be heard over a fight between Chapel and McCoy that leaves him feeling pretty certain that they're going to get back together soon anyway. He sneaks away eventually, and they hardly seem to notice. As far as he can tell all of their angst stems from the way McCoy treated Lieutenant Macabee's ingrown toenail a few weeks back.   
  
Back on the bridge, Kirk sits in his chair and watches Sulu do his job. He's quick but also careful, and sometimes his hand will hover over the conn for just a moment while he thinks about something, making a decision. Kirk fucking loves that, those little pauses. He loves the neat white bandages wrapped around Sulu's fingers, even loves the bruises.   
  
The shift ends, and Kirk has to stay on and review some new data that relates to the mission he'll leave for in two days with Spock, who gets incredibly long-winded whenever Kirk is desperate to leave the bridge. He watches Sulu go, and Sulu looks over to catch his eye shyly, then looks annoyed and hurries for the lift.  
  
“So you were right about McCoy and Chapel,” Kirk says when Spock in the middle of talking about something else. Spock frowns. Kirk really expected him to be more pleased about this.  
  
“I see,” Spock says. “And how are you handling the situation, Captain?”  
  
“I'm letting it play out.”  
  
“By that, do you mean that you are not planning on intervening?”  
  
“Not yet. Chapel wants to change shifts, but I'm gonna deny it for now. Spock, can I ask you something?”  
  
“Of course, Captain.”   
  
“What's it like being – romantically involved with a Lieutenant? You recommend it?”  
  
Spock actually seems stunned, which on him results in only a small stretch of quiet. He raises his eyebrows slightly.  
  
“It has been a satisfying experience thus far,” he says. “Does this question relate to your friendship with Lieutenant Sulu?”  
  
“No, no, I'm being totally hypothetical here. But while we're on the subject – what is your opinion of Lieutenant Sulu and me? Most people think we're already, you know. At it.”   
  
Spock considers this for a moment, clasping his hands behind his back and straightening his shoulders. Those eyebrows rise again, and he sticks out his lips just slightly. Kirk still can't even begin to conjure a mental image of Spock and Uhura doing each other, which is a shame, because it's probably pretty hot.   
  
“I am not an expert in these things,” Spock says. “But I do believe you might be well-suited. Lieutenant Sulu is an excellent, level-headed officer who is prone to occasional bouts of irrational behavior that border but do not quite constitute irresponsibility. I find you to be the same type of officer, sir, if you don't mind my saying so, and I believe this extends into your personal life as well.”  
  
“Interesting.” Kirk claps Spock's back, making him stumble forward a little. It never gets old. “Thanks for your input.”   
  
“I have only one reservation to express, Captain.”  
  
“About me and Sulu? What?”  
  
“I would urge you to determine as accurately as possible whether or not the lieutenant has overcome his grief over the death of Ensign Chekov sufficiently to allow him to begin another romantic relationship.”  
  
“Funny,” Kirk says, his chest pinching up. “That's the first time you and Bones have ever given me the same advice.”   
  
“I believe it to be sound advice, sir.”  
  
“Yep. Listen, I, uh, gotta go. We'll resume this conversation tomorrow?”  
  
“I believe that would be wise, sir. We have both been on duty for over ten hours.”  
  
“That we have. See you later, Spock.”  
  
Kirk is alone in the lift on the way down to his quarters. He leans against the back wall and focuses on breathing regularly. He's always had a talent for knowing exactly when he has to do something or live with regretting that he didn't. Knowing this about himself is the only reason he feels confident enough to fly through space with an entire ship's worth of lives in his hands, but he's still hesitant when it comes to Sulu, just one life that may or may not be in his hands. 


	5. Chapter 5

He goes to his room to change out of his uniform, thinking of his lucky shirt, and when he opens the door, Sulu is already there, pacing around the foyer area with his arms crossed over his chest, hands tucked under them. Kirk wants to pull his hands out, look at them, kiss them, but he just stands in the doorway, because it's been awhile since Sulu used the entry code Kirk gave him to let himself in, and Kirk really didn't think today would be the day.  
  
“Hey,” Kirk says. “I'm glad you came. You want some – ”  
  
“I think we just have to fuck and get it over with,” Sulu says, so jittery that for a second Kirk thinks he's hypo'ing drugs again. He walks closer, but Sulu's pupils aren't blown, and he's not sweaty, just shaking, looking cold.  
  
“Hikaru,” Kirk says.  
  
“I mean it. I've been thinking. We should just do it, and then it won't be this big thing hanging over our heads all the time, like it was – like it was on the beach.”  
  
“Okay.” Kirk holds up his hands. It's like Sulu is talking about something that doesn't have to do with the two of them having sex, because Kirk wants that more than anything and he still doesn't feel like he's going to get it. “Let's just calm down.”  
  
“I am calm,” Sulu says, practically shouting. “Here, we can do it on the couch, I already got myself ready.”  
  
Kirk's eyes bug out. He wants to hug Sulu, rock him in his arms, hold him in his lap, but that's not happening any time soon. Sulu looks like he's ready for another fight.  
  
“Got yourself ready?” Kirk says, feeling dazed.  
  
Sulu narrows his eyes. “You know what I mean.” Then suddenly he's taking off his pants.  
  
“Stop!” Kirk shouts, Sulu standing there with his hands on either side of his open fly, his chest heaving under his shirt. Kirk takes a step forward, and Sulu flinches.  
  
“You fucked Oliva and I beat the shit out of some drunk tourist before I left Ullia,” Sulu says. “I don't want to be like this.”  
  
“I didn't actually fuck her. She doesn't look a thing like you. My dick wasn't interested. Let me see your hands.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Please?”  
  
Kirk walks to Sulu, feeling like it's the room that's shaking around them, not just Sulu, not just him. He reaches for Sulu slowly, not wanting to startle him, and also afraid of what's about to happen, maybe even more than Sulu is. He takes Sulu's hands into his and looks them over, feeling his scars, the rough cotton of the bandages. He looks up into Sulu's eyes as he's bringing Sulu's left hand to his lips, and Sulu seems so lost and small as Kirk kisses his knuckles, the curve of his thumb, his bruised pinkie finger.  
  
“Stop,” Sulu says. He yanks his hands away and takes a step back. “It can't – no. It can't be like that.”  
  
“Then what, Hikaru?” Kirk asks, ready to do whatever Sulu wants, and pretty sure that he won't be allowed to, since Sulu can't seem to deal with what he wants. “How – how should it be?”  
  
“Like, um, like this,” Sulu says, and he drops to his knees. He reaches for Kirk's belt buckle, and Kirk sucks in a breath, feeling immobilized as Sulu tugs his pants open.  
  
“Hikaru,” Kirk says.  
  
“Just – let me,” Sulu says, sounding so broken that Kirk is afraid to speak. Sulu is breathing hard through his nose as he pushes Kirk's boxers down and takes his dick out. Kirk is still mostly soft, though the feeling of Sulu's hands, those bandages around his fingers, is getting him there even before Sulu swallows him down.  
  
“Fuck,” Kirk says in a hiss, his hand sliding into Sulu's hair. He's wanted to touch Sulu's hair so badly, and to live on his tongue. This isn't really going the way he planned, but Sulu's mouth is hot and wet and Kirk is getting hard fast, watching Sulu's lips slide around his dick. Sulu's eyes are closed, his hands braced on Kirk's thighs, and Kirk would do anything to get Sulu to look up at him, to meet his eyes while he does this.  
  
“Yeah,” Kirk moans, raking his fingers through Sulu's hair. “Fuck, yeah, that's – goddamn, Hikaru.”  
  
Sulu sighs and bobs his head as Kirk becomes fully hard in his mouth. He seems out of practice, or too nervous for technique, but he's eager as hell, drooling around Kirk's cock when he pulls back to tongue his slit. Kirk wants to pull him up and kiss him hard, to taste his precome on Sulu's lips, but Sulu is sucking him in again, only able to fit half in his mouth now that Kirk's cock is full and red. Sulu uses his hand on the rest, and he's pumping Kirk like he wants it so bad, Kirk's come down his throat, but then he pulls off just as Kirk is getting close, and Kirk almost loses it all over Sulu's face when he looks up at him, panting past those swollen lips, begging with his eyes.  
  
“Fuck me,” he says, and Kirk just nods, shoving his pants off.  
  
They do it on the floor, and Sulu grunts and pushes Kirk's hand away when he tries to check and see how well-prepared he is. Kirk is big, but Sulu acts like he does this every day, grabbing Kirk's cock roughly and pulling it to his hole, which feels slick.  
  
“Shit, Hikaru,” Kirk breathes out, needing to have some kind of dialogue.  
  
“Do it,” Sulu says, sounding angry. “C'mon, hurry, fuck, please.”  
  
Kirk tries to slide in slow, but Sulu grabs his hips and yanks him forward. They both scream, and Kirk doesn't miss the pain in Sulu's, so he goes still, propped over Sulu on his elbows, trying to kiss him, throbbing inside him. Sulu just turns his head away, groaning and jerking his hips, his heels digging into Kirk's back.  
  
“C'mon,” he says, his eyes closed tightly, nails digging into Kirk's arms. “C'mon.”  
  
Kirk tries again to kiss him, but Sulu keeps his mouth closed, then squeezes _hard_ around Kirk's cock, making him shout. _Fine_ , Kirk thinks, and he pins Sulu's shoulders, leaning back. He starts out slow, despite Sulu's cursing and prodding, because Sulu is unbelievably tight, and Kirk isn't going to last. He would have come already if Sulu had let him kiss him.  
  
“You like that?” Kirk asks as he speeds up, holding Sulu's knees out around him. Sulu is hissing and huffing, his eyes still closed and his cock rock hard against his belly.  
  
“Yeah,” Sulu whines out, tweaking one of his nipples. “Yeah, s'good.”  
  
“Let me,” Kirk says, leaning down and pushing Sulu's hand away. He bites and licks at Sulu's nipple, pistoning into him when he shouts, beginning to lose himself to this, the solid feeling of Sulu's body as he shudders beneath Kirk's, the crazy spasms of Sulu's hole as he tries to keep up with Kirk's thrusts, still adjusting.  
  
“Wanted to fuck you on the beach,” Kirk says, bracing himself with one hand on the floor and jacking Sulu's cock with the other. “All rough and dirty, while we were both still out of breath.”  
  
“Wait,” Sulu says, and Kirk goes still. He lets Sulu push him out, his cock aching to go off as it slides free of that tight ring of muscle. He's afraid it's over, that he did something wrong, but Sulu just flips over onto his hands and knees, offering his ass again.  
  
“Harder,” Sulu demands, turning back to Kirk. “C'mon.” He reaches back to grip one ass cheek in his hand, pulling himself open, lube dripping from his hole, and Kirk has to bite down on his tongue to keep from coming right then. He lines himself up and pushes back in, moaning. Sulu doesn't give himself time to adjust to the new angle, just starts slamming himself back onto Kirk's cock, grunting, his hands in fists against the floor.  
  
“Harder!” Sulu says again, and Kirk growls a little, annoyed. His hands go tight around Sulu's hips and he starts pounding him, hoping that everyone who walks by can hear Sulu's screams, hoping the passerby assume that Sulu couldn't even make it to the bedroom before he had to have Kirk in him, right by the front door after drooling for it all day on the bridge. Kirk reaches around to jack Sulu and is surprised when he comes, as if some part of him didn't believe Sulu was enjoying this at all. Feeling crazy, he reaches up to feed Sulu his come, and knows there's no turning back when Sulu moans as he sucks it from Kirk's fingers. Kirk explodes inside Sulu with a broken exclamation of _ah-a-ah!_ and falls onto Sulu's back, his hips still moving, making sure Sulu takes every drop.  
  
They pull apart and lie on the floor as they regain their breath, Kirk staring at Sulu and Sulu on his back, looking at the ceiling. Sulu's uniform shirt is still rucked up, his nipples showing, the one Kirk sucked on dark with blood. His pants and boots are kicked away, but he's still wearing his black socks, with the little silver Starfleet insignias stitched into the ankles.  
  
“You look so fucking good right now,” Kirk says, afraid to touch him. The floor is cold, and he wants to carry Sulu to bed, but as their orgasms wind down it's becoming pretty clear that Sulu isn't going to stay. He's twitchy and wrecked, refusing to meet Kirk's eyes.  
  
“I gotta go,” he says, sitting up on his elbows. He rubs his face with one hand, wincing.  
  
“Are you okay?” Kirk sits up beside him, dares to touch his shoulder. “I hope I didn't – you just kept wanting it harder, but –”  
  
“I'm fine,” Sulu snaps, glowering at him. He pushes down his shirt and grabs his underwear, then his pants. Kirk stretches out on the floor again and watches Sulu pull his underwear on. Black briefs, the hottest thing he's seen in his life, Sulu's uniform shirt just barely touching the waistband.  
  
“Let's talk about this,” Kirk says, though, if he's honest, he doesn't really want to, either.  
  
“I said I have to go.”  
  
“Sulu, God. What are you, fifteen? You think I don't know what's going on here?”  
  
“What's going on then, Kirk?” Sulu asks as he buckles his pants. The use of his last name stings, though Kirk is pretty sure that Sulu has never called him Jim, and never will.  
  
“You explain it to me, if it's so clear to you,” Sulu says. “I'm willing to admit there's tension between us. Fine! Why do you think I just – but this fixes it, and if it reaches that breaking point again, we'll just do this again. And that's – I mean, what more do you want from me?”  
  
It's true that Sulu has been up front from the beginning about the fact that he's got nothing to offer. He spent himself completely on Chekov, and now he's a shell who just needs some looking after from time to time. If he can't keep believing that, he'll crumble.  
  
“I want you to stay the night,” Kirk says. “I want – you know what I want. I like it when you're here.”  
  
Sulu scoffs and turns away. He pauses, seems to regret being a dick for a moment, then remembers that he's got a special allowance to do so and walks out of the room.  
  
*  
  
For two days, Kirk doesn't see Sulu except when they're on the bridge together. Kirk doesn't send him PADD messages or try to sit with him in the mess. He's better than that, above groveling, even if all he can think about is the way Sulu felt around his cock, the hungry pull of his body and then that _give_ when he really let Kirk in, the way his face cleared of everything for two seconds, as if all he knew was that Kirk was inside him, and nothing else meant anything.  
  
Kirk watches Sulu closely while he works, not sure what he's looking for. Sulu is cautious and almost apologetic when he has to address Kirk, who is cold to him, though he knows he shouldn't be. Sulu is going to have to do this in stages, if he does it at all, and Kirk shouldn't be surprised that the first stage is resolute fucking, without kissing or eye contact. He still feels used, and pissed off, because he had so many amazing fantasies, and reality just pissed all over them. It's the kind of thing he thought he'd guarded himself against, but he's allowed himself to expect a lot from Sulu anyway.  
  
The time to leave for the away mission arrives, and Kirk tries not to feel hurt when Sulu doesn't show up to see him off. Uhura is there, kissing Spock, stroking the back of his neck. They look over to give Kirk their usual _Stop staring_ glance.  
  
“Are you okay?” Uhura asks, her arms still around Spock's neck. Kirk has always appreciated the hint of accusation in her tone.  
  
“What makes you think I'm not?” Kirk asks, and Uhura rolls her eyes. Kirk wonders what Spock tells her about him, and then he just feels overwhelming affection for both of them, and the idea that they would discuss him at all. They've become almost parental figures for him, the steadiness of their relationship a comfort. Uhura acts like he's just a pain in her ass, but when he came back from that mission where he almost bled to death she visited him, and sat for awhile, smiling when Kirk rolled his eyes at Bones' grumbling.  
  
He beams down to the planet with Spock, and the work is a pleasant distraction, long meetings with dignitaries, some debates that get a little heated, then a feast featuring some culturally significant ribbon dancing. Kirk is glad that it's just him and Spock, who doesn't need to make small talk and doesn't even think to inquire about his progress with Sulu.  
  
“We should have stuff like this on the ship,” Kirk says, after he's had a few refills of ceremonial wine.  
  
“Like this?” Spock asks, eying the ribbon dancers warily.  
  
“Yeah. Cultural shit. Talent shows.”  
  
He's plotting out ways to implement this idea when suddenly everything goes to hell. There's an explosion on the far end of the banquet hall, and Kirk and Spock are up from the table with their phasers drawn before the first screams ring out.  
  
It's pretty clear from the start that it's a set-up, something arranged by the planet's leaders, the climactic event of the evening. Five Eraks die in the blast, and they don't even get very creative about imprisoning Kirk and Spock, just sort of drag them away once the smoke has cleared. Spock speaks Erakian but not very well, and Kirk knows about three words of it, which wasn't supposed to be important on this mission, but suddenly it's like their gracious hosts have all forgotten the Standard they were speaking two hours ago.  
  
The Erakians are trying to get a trade treaty passed with the Klingons, but the Federation won't allow it because of who the Klingons are, and now Kirk and Spock are bartering chips. Their cell isn't bad; Kirk has seen worse. There are cots and a water cooler, even a little barred window through which they can see the _Enterprise_ when it orbits past every couple of hours. They're allowed to keep their PADDs, and Spock immediately begins sending messages to Lieutenant Commander Petra, who was left in charge.  
  
“Don't forget to message Uhura,” Kirk says as he settles in for the night on the cot. Federation delegates are on the way, and he's in a bad mood, because he prefers to negotiate his own releases, but none of the Erakians will talk to him now.  
  
“Message Lieutenant Uhura, sir?” Spock says, looking up from his PADD. “What information would you like me to relay to her?”  
  
“That you're okay,” Kirk says. “She expected you back five hours ago, and I'm sure the news that we're being held hostage has already spread through the ship.” He's considered the fact that Sulu knows, and he feels kind of glad about that, wanting Sulu to worry about him, until he thinks about the fact that Chekov died trying to come back from an away mission.  
  
“I have relayed the information about our safety to Lieutenant Uhura, sir,” Spock says a few minutes later, probably only pretending to miss the point. “Though there was really no reason for her to be concerned. I do not believe that the Erakians will harm us. I think the Federation could be persuaded to allow them to trade with the Klingons. We were, after all, issued instructions to relent if serious threats were made –”  
  
“Yeah, yeah.” Kirk wishes he'd done that now, and feels stupid about how proud he was for arguing the Erakians down during their meetings, but they weren't exactly giving off kidnapping vibes back then.  
  
He's half-asleep by the time his PADD chimes with a new message, but he was expecting one, waiting, so he jumps awake easily and grabs it, checking for that name, and there it is: _Sender: H. Sulu_.  
  
_are you ok?_  
  
Like he couldn't even be bothered to spell out _okay_ properly. Still, Kirk's eyes burn a little, and he hurries to respond.  
  
_Yeah. No big deal. We'll be out of here by morning. The Fed sent in their big time bullshitters, but they'll end up giving in. Oh well. World's not going to end if the Erakians can buy cigars from the Klingons again._  
  
He's not sure what Sulu is supposed to say to that, but he waits, wondering if Sulu is in Chekov's room or his. Probably Chekov's, but Kirk likes the idea that Sulu might start to feel like he's suffocating there and sneak into Kirk's, where there's plenty of air, higher ceilings. Maybe he's been doing it for a long time, snooping around while Kirk is on shift, touching Kirk's Old Crow t-shirt, wondering where he got it and if he'd ever get to see him wearing it. Kirk just wants Sulu to think about him all the time, even if he's pissed off about it, even if it's happening against his will.  
  
_Remember the first time we stayed up messaging each other? That night?_ Sulu sends, and that definitely wasn't what Kirk was expecting. He sits up a little straighter and checks on Spock, who is typing away on his own PADD, probably talking to Uhura.  
  
_Yeah, I remember_ , Kirk says, not daring anything more until he hears the rest.  
  
_I got mad about how much I liked that_ , Sulu sends.  
  
Kirk waits for more, but there's nothing, so now the burden of doing something with that information is on him. He blows out his breath and looks up at the barred window, but the _Enterprise_ isn't visible at the moment.  
  
_Mad at me or mad at yourself?_ Kirk asks.  
  
_Mostly at you._  
  
Kirk grins. He wants Sulu in this cot with him, warm between his legs, asleep with his head on Kirk's chest. He wants him all the time, every part of him, and knowing that this is never going to change is as amazing as it is awful. If he lost Sulu and someone else came along – but, no, fuck no. It's an impossible, disgusting, unnatural idea, that this kind of affection could ever be transferred. So he really should cut Sulu some slack, but Kirk wants this to be different. He wants Sulu to realize that he loved Chekov a lot but still not as much as he could someday love Kirk. It's not going to happen, the reverse much more likely, but still, it's what Kirk wants. He can admit that to himself now.  
  
_I wish you were here_ , Kirk sends, because it's a joke, kind of.  
  
_Thanks a lot_ , Sulu sends, and then, _Me too._  
  
*  
  
After fifteen hours of negotiation, Kirk and Spock are released and allowed to return to the _Enterprise_. Kirk's stomach feels empty and he needs a shower, but he fully plans on going to Sulu first. He doesn't need to. Sulu is there in the transport room beside Uhura when they arrive, waiting.  
  
“Welcome back, Captain, Commander,” Uhura says, smiling before pulling Spock into a hug. Kirk stands before Sulu, his hands twitching at his sides. Sulu is trying so hard to appear as if he's not broken open that Kirk wants to hide him under his shirt. Sulu's breath smells like coffee and his hair needs combing.  
  
“How was it?” Sulu asks, like he's inquiring about Kirk's vacation. Sulu is fidgety, blushing, and looks like he hasn't slept. Uhura is watching them, then she's leading Spock away.  
  
“As far as being held hostage for political reasons goes?” Kirk says. “I give it three stars. At least I had my PADD.” They sent messages back and forth for almost five hours, talking about nothing, killing time. Sulu told Kirk he thought that the worst feeling in the world was watching a beloved cartoon from your childhood and realizing in hindsight that it wasn't as funny or exciting as you remembered. Kirk told Sulu that when he was twenty-one he went to Florida with this girl he was kind of dating and peed on her leg, at her request, after she was stung by a jellyfish. They haven't even begun to know everything about each other, but they got the groundwork laid down early, and filling in the gaps between the more devastating bits feels good.  
  
“When I first heard,” Sulu says, looking back over his shoulder. Scotty is at the controls in the little room behind them, but the transport area is empty. “Before I heard the details, for a second I thought. I thought –”  
  
“Sorry to make you worry,” Kirk says, wanting to save Sulu from having to admit to anything out loud. That bullet, he'll take. “Let's go home, okay?”  
  
Sulu looks up abruptly, like he's going to object, because of course Kirk is talking about his quarters. It's the moment of truth, maybe, here in the cold hum of the transport room, both of them tired and unwashed. Sulu chews his lip, rubs a hand over his face, then nods slowly.  
  
“I slept there last night,” he says, whispering, and Kirk could cry with relief. He can't wait any longer, so he takes Sulu by the elbow and pulls him out of the transport room.  
  
“Welcome home, sir,” Scotty calls out as they pass.  
  
“Yep,” Kirk says. It's the first time he's felt like he has one in awhile.  
  
*  
  
They don't speak on the way to Kirk's quarters, don't even look at each other. The lights in all of Kirk's rooms stay off, everything just faintly blue in the glow of the aquarium. Kirk waits to kiss Sulu until they're in the bedroom, where he stops at the foot of the bed and takes Sulu's face in both his hands. Sulu looks like he's trying hard not to think about how much he needs this, and he makes a soft little coaxing sound when Kirk's lips finally press against his. It takes only two strokes of Kirk's tongue across Sulu's bottom lip to get him to open for him, and it quickly turns hot, wet, and hungry, both of them breathing hard into each other's mouths, Sulu's hands finding Kirk's hips. Sulu tastes like stale coffee, and like the tree that Kirk knew by instinct to eat fruit from, like the thing that will keep him alive.  
  
Kirk takes his clothes off, feeling like he's never really been naked before now, the idea that he's already been inside Sulu surreal. This is different, and he's afraid Sulu will bolt at any minute, so he's gentle as he helps him undress, pulling his shirt over his head and kissing him while he unfastens his pants.  
  
“Can you feel me staring at you when we're on the bridge?” Kirk asks as Sulu's pants pool around his ankles. Kirk runs his hands greedily over Sulu's chest, his back, and along the waistband of his briefs, gray today. Sulu seems dumbstruck, and he shakes his head slowly.  
  
“I don't think I know how to do this anymore,” he says, though he's stepping closer, leaning into Kirk's touch.  
  
“Just let me, then,” Kirk says. He kisses Sulu's lips, the side of his nose. “I'll show you.”  
  
Kirk has never really gotten off on trust before, but his cock is full to bursting as Sulu lies beneath him on the bed, surrendered, moaning softly as Kirk kisses his way from Sulu's ear lobe down to the trembling flat of his stomach. Kirk sighs against the tiny hairs that cover it, rubbing his face there until Sulu laughs a little. Kirk looks up at him and grins.  
  
“I'm going to blow you,” Kirk says, punctuating this with a sharp little lick against the head of Sulu's cock, which is standing up near Kirk's face, precome shining at the tip. “Then I'm going to fuck you,” he says, gentle but firm. Sulu nods, his legs spreading a little wider. Kirk crawls up to kiss him, still afraid that Sulu will flinch away, but Sulu opens for him, one hand sliding up into Kirk's hair.  
  
“Jim,” he says, just testing the name, taking a little taste of it. Kirk pulls back to look into Sulu's eyes, their noses pressed together.  
  
“Got no idea how much I need this,” Kirk says. He takes Sulu's hand and sucks on his tender pinkie, his mouth getting wet for Sulu's moans, and the texture of his scars. He sucks Sulu's fingers one at a time, then two at a time, watching Sulu's face. Sulu looks a little bit like he did when he was high, and a little like he did when they lay on the floor together in the beachfront room, ready to fall over the edge of this bottomless pit.  
  
Kirk moves down to lick Sulu's cock, taking time to appreciate it now that Sulu is relaxed beneath him, legs spreading wider, hips twitching up toward Kirk's mouth. He's smaller than Kirk but thick, and they both moan as Kirk's lips strain around him, sucking him in deep.  
  
“Fuck yeah,” Sulu breathes out, both hands in Kirk's hair now, those perfect fingers massaging through it. Sulu's cock is like his fingers, sturdy and salty and so warm, made to slide in and out of Kirk's mouth. He squeezes Sulu's open thighs while he sucks him, feeling the thrum of Sulu's heartbeat under his thumbs when they press in close.  
  
“Gonna – come, I'm gonna come,” Sulu warns, pulling a little on Kirk's hair. Kirk just groans in encouragement, using the vibrations of his throat to tell Sulu he wants it in his mouth, wants to suck him until he's dry. Sulu seems to understand this, swelling on Kirks' tongue and going tense around him. He curses and arches and explodes in Kirk's mouth, moaning in a helpless way that makes Kirk's dick throb as he swallows. He's breathless when he pulls off, and Sulu is too, beautifully wrecked as he watches Kirk crawl up to kiss him.  
  
“That –” Sulu manages to say before Kirk devours his lips, dropping down onto him as they kiss. Sulu's arms wind around the small of Kirk's back, and it's heaven, it's real, better than anything Kirk is capable of dreaming. Kirk pulls back to smile at Sulu, nuzzling his cheek and checking his eyes to see if he's okay. Sulu just sighs and paws at Kirk's back, weakened and heavily-lidded, licking at Kirk's lips in lazy intervals.  
  
“Fuck me now,” he says, whispering, and it's a million miles away from the way he asked for it last time. Kirk nods and bends down to kiss Sulu's neck, drawing low moans from him as he rubs his cock against Sulu's hip like he's making promises with it. He could do this forever, nothing but this.  
  
“So good,” Kirk says, praising Sulu for just lying there, which is all Kirk needs from him right now. He scoots down, drawing his hands over Sulu's chest as he does, tickling his sides until he grins. Kirk wants to tell him he loves him with every intake and exhale, but Sulu already knows.  
  
He rolls Sulu onto his stomach and spends a long time prepping him, until he knows Sulu is rock hard again, whining and rubbing himself against the mattress. Kirk is propped up on his elbow, kissing Sulu's cheek as he stretches him, watching his face as it pinches and relaxes. There's this soft chant of _yeah, yeah, yeah_ falling from his lips like a prayer, and Kirk wonders if he's the only one who's ever seen Sulu like this, so unguarded. He finds Sulu's prostate and makes him come just so he can see his face when he loses it, almost coming himself as Sulu clenches hard around his fingers.  
  
Sulu is boneless and relaxed by the time Kirk pushes into him, still humming from his orgasm. Kirk fucks him on his back so they can kiss, and he takes his sweet time, framing Sulu's face with his hands as he licks into his mouth and moves inside him, wanting to live like this, poured all around him, Sulu's legs holding him in place.  
  
“Goddamn,” Kirk whispers when he knows he's going to come, his hips rolling hard and fast, Sulu's heels at his back egging him on. “Hikaru – _ah_.” He crushes his mouth to Sulu's and comes like a dam breaking when Sulu sucks on the end of his tongue. The noise Kirk pushes into Sulu's mouth is undignified and almost weepy, but he doesn't care, just moans out the end of it as he empties himself into Sulu, feeling like he can die now, like a hollow thing that's now overflowing, forever quenched.  
  
Sulu starts crying before Kirk even pulls out, and by the time he's slipped free and rolled Sulu against his chest he's really sobbing, clinging to Kirk, his whole body jerking with it. Kirk whispers _shh_ and then realizes that's wrong, Sulu should be allowed this. Kirk's heart is slamming with the fear that Sulu will run away, tell him he can't do this, that it was a mistake, but as he winds down into embarrassed sniffling, Kirk decides it's safe to pull the blankets up around them.  
  
“Sorry,” Sulu says wetly, rubbing his face against Kirk's chest.  
  
“Don't be sorry. It's okay.”  
  
“It's just—”  
  
“I know.”  
  
Sulu will never have to say the hard things, as long as Kirk's around. He'll protect Sulu from that, from everything. He arranges the blankets more snugly around Sulu's shoulders and squeezes him tight, kissing along his hairline, breathing in the smell of him.  
  
They're quiet for awhile, Sulu sniffling and hiding his face. Kirk will hold him like this forever if that's what he needs. His body is still buzzing with the thrill of being connected to Sulu's, his lips tingling like lottery winners, salty with the taste of Sulu's come. He's still debating whether or not to tell Sulu he loves him out loud. Probably he's had enough excitement for one day, and anyway, it's not like he doesn't know.  
  
“I still want you to be my best friend, okay?” Sulu says, spreading his hand open on Kirk's back.  
  
“Okay.” Kirk isn't sure what he's agreeing to. That they'll never be anything resembling a couple? Just fuck buddies who enjoy cuddling? It's okay, he supposes, as long as Sulu sleeps here in his bed, every night, just like this, safe in his arms. Even if he cries every time they fuck. Kirk could care less. He just needs him near.  
  
“You must be hungry,” Sulu says when Kirk's stomach growls.  
  
“I'm not going anywhere,” Kirk says, and Sulu curls around him more tightly.  
  
“Just – a little while longer,” Sulu mumbles against Kirk's skin, embarrassed.  
  
“Yeah,” Kirk agrees, petting Sulu's hair as his heart jerks with panic. Just a little while longer. He thinks of all Bones' warnings. Even Spock had one for him. He buries his face in Sulu's hair and tries to imagine he can feel both their souls stirring, fusing in some unbreakable way, but even if he believed in that kind of stuff, it wouldn't mean anything. What he needs is Sulu's living, breathing body beside his all the time, and even if he owns some piece of Sulu's soul, he's not the only one who does. He might be the only one who can actually take comfort in Sulu's body now, but Chekov could still rip it away from him. It's not the kind of thing the Chekov who navigated on the _Enterprise_ and smiled at Kirk in line at the mess would have done, but that Chekov is gone forever, and his memory is a brutal force of nature in Kirk's mind. He can only imagine the kind of tyranny it wields over Sulu's.  
  
Eventually they get up and dress in underwear and t-shirts; Kirk insists that Sulu wear his Old Crow Medicine Show shirt, and he puts on one he considered lucky at the Academy, an exam-taking shirt. Things are cozy for now, but they need a little luck. They get tacos from the replicator and Sulu reminisces about Mexican food on Earth. It's like they're back to being friends again for an hour or so, not touching, bullshitting with stories about getting shit-faced on margaritas. Just as Kirk is starting to get antsy Sulu says he wants to watch the news, and he doesn't shrug away when Kirk sits beside him on the couch and curls an arm around his shoulders. Sulu leans onto Kirk a little, keeping his eyes on the screen, and tosses his arm across Kirk's lap. Kirk kisses the top of Sulu's head as the newscaster from Archfold-8 talks about riots relating to the latest rythball match. He could live like this, Sulu's quiet breath and the dark room, the glow of the data screen like a fire that's keeping them warm.  
  
“I guess I'll go get my stuff,” Sulu says when Kirk has started to doze off, his cheek pressed to the top of Sulu's head. He moans and sits forward to rub at his eyes.  
  
“Okay,” he says, though he wants to go with him, stand outside the door of Chekov's old room like he did when Sulu collected the things he wanted to keep. Kirk wonders if he'll bring the box here, and where he'll keep it.  
  
He doesn't bring the box, and returns after over two hours with only a toothbrush and his PADD. He doesn't meet Kirk's eyes as he walks in, just puts the toothbrush beside the sink and the PADD on the bedside table. Kirk stares at him until Sulu finally looks up, his shoulders raised.  
  
“It's not like I was going to move in just because we fucked twice,” Sulu says, and Kirk gets the feeling it's put on, something he decided to say before he got here, but it still stings.  
  
“Go back to that room if you want to,” Kirk says, barely stopping himself from saying _back to that tomb_. Sulu moans and walks over to the bed, falling onto it, face first.  
  
“It's not like I don't want to be here,” he mutters into the sheets. Kirk leans down onto him, pressing him against the bed, nosing at the back of his neck.  
  
“Sorry,” Kirk says. “I didn't really expect you to move in right away.”  
  
“I know,” Sulu says. “Or, yeah – Kirk. I think you kind of did.”  
  
So he's not _Jim_ unless they're naked and pressed against each other. That's okay, maybe even good. Kirk gives Sulu a dry hump, though he's too tired to fuck again tonight. It took a lot out of both of them.  
  
“Fine,” Kirk says. “I'll cop to wanting you here all the time. I would have copped to that a year ago. Maybe. But, hey. Do what you need to do.”  
  
“I think I need a beer, and then sleep,” Sulu says, and Kirk smiles against the back of his neck.  
  
“Sure, Lieutenant,” he says. “Admirable strategy.”  
  
They have a few drinks and Sulu talks about fencing. He must be happy, because he's gushing, telling Kirk all about the rules and the competitions he did as a teenager, his father's semi-disapproval. Kirk listens to the juicy parts and zones out when Sulu rhapsodizes about the technical aspects. They're in Kirk's bed together, touching each other at weird intervals, like kids who've just discovered it. Kirk rubs one finger into the hollow of Sulu's throat, and Sulu sneaks his hand under Kirk's shirt, poking at his stomach as if to test its sturdiness. Eventually they press together and make out sleepily, their legs twisted in the blankets.  
  
“Is it that weird that I want you to sleep here?” Kirk asks. Sulu laughs.  
  
“It was, once,” he says. “But I did it anyway, so. I can't really judge.”  
  
Sulu rolls over and Kirk wraps around him, spooning him good, like he has in his fantasies every night for the past year, sometimes curling around pillows to aid his daydreams. Sulu feels like Kirk knew he would: solid and warm and perfect enough to make him anxious, like a puzzle piece that locks against his chest. Whatever happens next, Kirk won't be the same, like the way that Sulu was changed by Chekov, hardened a bit even before he lost him, just for guarding himself against the possibility. Kirk wonders what Sulu did for those two hours when he was gone. Did he go through the Chekov box, forcing himself to remember? Did he stare at the wall in that room, or out at the stars through that window where they sat together after the last crew party? There will always be things about Sulu that Kirk isn't allowed to know. He should be okay with this, but it's not fair, because he wants Sulu to know everything about him, and he suspects that, for the most part, Sulu already does.  
  
*  
  
Over the next few weeks, more of Sulu's things slowly begin to accumulate in Kirk's quarters. His fencing things, dumped in the bedroom after practice as Kirk dragged him to the shower, then more of his clothes, left there progressively and laundered by Kirk, who has discreetly emptied a drawer for Sulu's things. Sometimes, if Sulu is still on shift, Kirk will open the drawer and just run his fingers over Sulu's t-shirts and briefs, feeling like an idiot but unable to stop himself. Before, none of Sulu's things lived in Kirk's quarters for long, not even his toothbrush. When Sulu shows up with his plants one night, Kirk knows things must be serious. He makes a place for them by the aquarium.  
  
“This is good, actually,” Sulu says, obviously flustered by this gesture himself, fussing with the arrangement of the little pots, avoiding Kirk's eyes. “The sentient ones can watch the fish. They do better with some variable stimulation.”  
  
When he finally looks up from the plants, Kirk tries to be smiling in a way that won't freak him out, but he probably is. He pulls Sulu into his arms, still a little cautious, always afraid Sulu will have reached his tolerance limit. Sulu lets Kirk hug him, his chin dropping to Kirk's shoulder. He sighs, sounding very tired, like he had to cross several mountain ranges on his way back to Kirk's quarters with those plants. They don't have sex that night, and Sulu sleeps on the opposite side of the huge bed, but in the morning he smiles and offers Kirk his neck when Kirk crawls over to kiss him.  
  
It's strange for Kirk, too. He's never done this. It helps that they essentially lived together before, when Sulu was in detox and afterward, but sometimes they sink into those old routines and feel awkward about reaching for each other. Kirk usually takes that bullet himself, trying not to be bothered by the fact that it's never Sulu who initiates physical contact. Once they start really kissing, after that first moan of Sulu's when Kirk's tongue pushes in to find his, the awkwardness dissipates, and Sulu still seems to want it hard most of the time, which is fine by Kirk, as long as he gets to kiss him again when they're through.  
  
Sometimes Kirk still feels like a demented admirer. He watches Sulu sleep, curling around him when his brows knit like he's having a bad dream. He dances around Sulu's moods, constantly trying to gauge whether or not Sulu wants to be touched. He wonders if that box full of Chekov's things will live forever in Chekov's old room, and how often Sulu goes to visit it. Every time they're not together, Kirk assumes Sulu is sitting in that room, going through that box, which is ridiculous. Sulu has other responsibilities on the ship: the botany lab, the fencing class that Kirk goaded him into teaching. But Kirk is afraid to track him, afraid that he'll find the dot that represents Sulu's current location planted firmly in that room, unmoving.  
  
Also, it's kind of creepy to track the location of the guy you're sleeping with, and Kirk has never been like this before, so he tries to be less obsessive, even actively backs off for awhile. It's nice, focusing on work, coming back to the quarters late and finding Sulu already asleep, moaning and squirming across the bed to find Kirk under the blankets. He tries to go on a sex strike as well, determined not to give in until Sulu is forced to make the first move, but on the third day they're watching the news together after their shift when Sulu raises his arms over his head, arching into a stretch with a deep groan, his shirt riding up, and Kirk tackles him. Sulu laughs and lets Kirk pull his shirt off, moaning as Kirk licks his nipples and reaches down to palm his cock. He always gives in and lets Kirk have him, whispering _yeah_ and tearing Kirk's clothes off just as eagerly.  
  
Knowing that Sulu will allow him to what he likes isn't enough. Kirk wants him to need it this bad, too. He wants to devote a whole room inside his quarters to the Chekov box, and to let Sulu sit alone inside it for as long as he needs to, as often as he likes. He got okay with sharing Sulu with a ghost a long time ago, he just wants Sulu close by even when he's with Chekov, wants to sit on the other side of the door and wait for him to emerge.  
  
Sulu has stopped talking about Chekov altogether, and Kirk wishes he could figure out a way to tell Sulu that the subject isn't disallowed just because they've started sleeping together, but he's afraid to bring Chekov up, too. Most of the time they talk about nothing of substance, as if they're at the beginning of whatever they're doing, not lodged so tightly in the middle that sometimes they can't breathe. They're polite with each other in a way that worries Kirk. If Sulu's elbow bumps Kirk's as they're brushing their teeth, he apologizes. Maybe it's a growing up with sisters thing. Kirk is more apt to elbow him harder, hoping to start a pretend fight that will turn into sex.  
  
“Have you told your sisters that you're sleeping with your captain?” Kirk asks when they're in bed together one night and Sulu is being particularly sweet, licking softly at Kirk's neck in his post-sex glow, still breathing a little hard through his nose. Kirk will never, ever get tired of the fact that his sheets smell like Sulu's come.  
  
“I guess I should,” Sulu says. He sounds like he's about as enthusiastic about the idea as he would be about going in front of a firing squad. “Have you told your mom that you're sleeping with your alpha pilot?”  
  
“We don't really talk about stuff that like that.”  
  
“You guys aren't close?”  
  
“Nah. I mean, yeah, but only in times of crisis? She sort of ditched me and Sam when we were kids, would go off to space for months and leave us on Earth with her brother Frank, this redneck loser who got off on ordering us around. It didn't exactly help the situation with Sam.” Kirk hasn't talked or even thought about the Frank years in a long time. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I almost died?” he asks.  
  
“No,” Sulu says. He scoots closer, like the idea bothers him, but he's smiling like he's also charmed by the fact that Kirk has almost died in more ways than the ones he's aware of.  
  
“I drove a car over a cliff. My dad's old car. It was an act of rebellion against Frank.”  
  
“Holy shit.” Sulu laughs and presses his face to Kirk's, clearly impressed. “You were a junior bad ass. I guess I should have known.”  
  
“I wasn't, though, that's the thing. Not until that moment. I was the good kid, the kiss up. Sam was the cool one who was always getting in trouble. I guess more than rebelling against Frank I was trying to impress my brother. He was actually running away from home that day. He was thirteen and I thought he was the toughest guy in the world, so I knew he wasn't faking, he was really going to do it. After I got arrested and everything, he stayed, I think mostly to make sure Frank didn't beat the shit out of me. Sometimes I think – if I hadn't done that, if I hadn't been so obsessed with getting Sam's attention, he would have gotten out of there, maybe not turned into, you know. What he turned into.”  
  
“That's bullshit, though,” Sulu says, his hand finding Kirk's hip under the blanket. “A kid on his own – if he had left he would have been even worse off, probably.”  
  
“I don't know,” Kirk says. He makes himself smirk, not wanting to get into the heavy shit now, not while Sulu is soft like this. “Sam could have ended up in an abandoned warehouse in the middle of some random city and he would have had a better chance of not going out of his mind than he did in Riverside.”  
  
Sulu doesn't say that's crazy, though Kirk knows he deserves to hear it. He moans and folds himself around Sulu, unable to believe his luck. Sulu always smells a little bit like him after sex, a subtle thing that Kirk can't quite define, and it makes him nip at Sulu's ear and paw at him possessively.  
  
“You should show me pictures,” Sulu says. “I can't picture you as a kid.”  
  
“Okay – ah, tomorrow?” Kirk has pictured Sulu as a kid pretty often, but he's pictured Sulu in most every scenario possible, all of his daydreams co-opted by Sulu's face.  
  
As the months pass, people begin to acknowledge what's happening between Kirk and Sulu, yeomen smiling at them when they walk through the halls together. Kirk takes Sulu on almost all of his away missions, but they don't share rooms or tents, because Sulu likes to maintain the appearance of professionalism, though he doesn't object when Kirk sneaks into his room or tent at the first opportunity.  
  
Chapel doesn't request a shift change again, so Kirk assumes she's back with Bones, though he doesn't dare ask. He catches them together in sick bay one night, when he's stopping by to see Bones, and gets about five steps from the half-open door of Bones' office before he hears the tone of Bones' voice and stops.  
  
“You like that?” Bones says, soft and low, overplaying the drawl, and Chapel sighs, just short of a moan. Kirk flees, and pounces on Sulu as soon as he's through the door of his quarters.  
  
“I told my sisters about you,” Sulu says one night after a late alpha shift, when they're alone in the lift together. They're standing a few feet apart, watching the numbers on the display change as the elevator rises; Sulu won't touch Kirk outside of his quarters, which is fine by Kirk, who enjoys knowing that Sulu wants to, and that he's holding himself back, his heart beating a little faster with anticipation.  
  
“What'd they say?” Kirk asks. He still hasn't told his mother that he's in love, but it's not the kind of thing he wants her to know. She hasn't had a real relationship since his father died. He's afraid she'd be on Chekov's side.  
  
“They said – I don't know, they were happy for me. They asked a lot of questions.”  
  
“Yeah? Like what?”  
  
“Just questions about you, mostly. What you're like.”  
  
“They want to meet me?” Kirk asks, unable to keep from smiling. Sulu looks over at him and laughs.  
  
“Sure,” he says. “Someday.”  
  
“When's the last time they met someone you were, uh, hooked up with?” It's a not-creative way to ask if they met Chekov, and to pretend that Kirk still considers this to be a hook up.  
  
“Uh, well.” Sulu scratches at his head. “The high school girlfriend, I guess, was the last one they met. So between her and the guy I OD'd over at the Academy, they're not all trusting when it comes to me and my – you know. Romantic – whatever.”  
  
“Yeah, but you've got Pavel on your track record,” Kirk says, his throat tightening. It's a name neither of them has said in awhile. “So they've got to give you credit there.”  
  
“Yeah,” Sulu says lightly, watching the numbers again. “They didn't know him, though. Meiko and Kara video chatted with him once. They made fun of me for how young he was, but I guess they liked him. They liked how happy I was.”  
  
The doors open to the C deck, and they head toward Kirk's room, Sulu in a funk now, his eyes on the floor. Kirk is going to keep prodding the Chekov bubble until it bursts, for better or worse. It's not the kind of thing Sulu can carry around inside him forever. Chekov will always be in him in a way that Kirk can't touch, but the bubble around him will turn toxic if it's left there too long.  
  
“So what'd you tell them about me?” Kirk asks, crowding Sulu as he tends to his plants. “When they asked what I was like?”  
  
“I said you were a great captain and, you know. My best friend.”  
  
“So no mention of the rumors about my enormous cock being true, then?”  
  
Sulu snorts out a laugh, but doesn't turn from his pruning and watering. They don't have sex that night. Kirk lies in bed wondering if Sulu once described Chekov as his best friend. Of course he did; they were inseparable. They had more in common, really, than Kirk and Sulu do. Happy childhoods. Nerdish little hobbies. A kind of quiet calm that Kirk lacks.  
  
Around what would be Christmastime on Earth, the Klingons launch an aggressive campaign that keeps everyone busy and harried for months. Kirk loses himself to it, sometimes pulling twenty-four hour shifts before Bones shows up and drags him off the bridge, grumbling about exhaustion and irresponsibility. Whenever he does come off shift, Kirk can count on Sulu being face-down in bed, snoring, often still dressed in his uniform, sometimes even with his boots on, like he's ready to hop up and do battle at any moment. Kirk at least dresses down to his undershirt and boxers before sliding down on top of Sulu, usually so tired that he can barely smile at Sulu's half-awake grunt of acknowledgement before falling asleep himself.  
  
When they do have the energy for sex it's usually quick and dirty, up against the wall in the shower or over the side of the bed, Sulu bent forward with his knees on the floor, growling out encouragement as he reaches back to squeeze Kirk's ass with a grip that leaves bruises. They fall into the habit of marking each other like this during sex, so that when they're on the bridge for fifteen hours, in sight of each other but unable to touch, they can at least lean back onto the bruises or reach up to run their fingers over the bite marks on their necks.  
  
After almost three months of this, things finally calm down enough for an off day for the alpha crew. Kirk plans to spend most of his inside Sulu, who goes along with this for a few hours, then gives Kirk a sleepy, well-fucked grin and tells him he has something he wants to show him. Thinking that he's referring to some sort of new position in bed, Kirk groans when Sulu takes his hands and pulls him from the blankets.  
  
“You'll like this,” Sulu says as they dress. “I promise.”  
  
They head for the botany lab, which comprises much of the starboard side of the H deck, and where Sulu spends most of his free time when he's not in the gym or Kirk's bed. There are four different quadrants: a jungle environment with insects and noisy parrots, an agricultural area used by the nutritionists who run the messes and also by certain individuals, like Sulu, who have staked out there own little corners, a research-focused laboratory, and the recreational garden, which is a nice simulation of a meadow full of wildflowers, fake sky and all, even a few songbirds. It's a popular place for reading and picnicking, but it's probably known best as a place for couples to go and stroll together. Kirk feels pretty honored to have been brought to the recreational garden by Sulu, especially when he takes Kirk's hand and leads him all the way to the back, behind the waterfall that dumps into a pond full of flowering lily pads.  
  
“This is my secret,” Sulu says as they slip into a rocky area behind the waterfall, which is just wide enough for them to sit down in, the rocks to their backs and their legs stretched out to touch the wall of the room. “You're the captain and I bet you didn't even know about it.”  
  
“I didn't,” Kirk says, trying not to smile too hard at the boyish grin on Sulu's face, not wanting Sulu to think he's laughing at him. The little area is covered with tiny blue flowers, and the effect is pretty cool, with the natural landscape butting up against the plain wall behind the waterfall, which is video-painted to resemble a meadow that stretches on into the distance, the toes of their boots making the image shimmer when they touch it.  
  
“Anyway, I just think it's nice,” Sulu says, leaning back onto the rocks. He's blushing a little, chewing his lip. “I always come here when I need to feel kind of – hidden away from everyone for awhile. I never bring anyone here, but I was here the other day, and – look.”  
  
He picks one of the little blue flowers and holds it up to Kirk's face, smiling, blushing harder.  
  
“Exact same color as your eyes,” Sulu says. “I mean, exact. One time when I was high I came back here and thought they probably picked these flowers for the rec garden on purpose, to match the captain's eyes. Like if you had brown eyes there would be brown flowers here.” He smirks. “It seemed like the most brilliant concept ever at the time.”  
  
Kirk moans and leans against Sulu, resting his cheek on Sulu's chest and slinging a leg over his lap. Sulu was thinking about the color of his eyes even when he was still getting high. Sulu slides an arm around Kirk and they stay like that for awhile, listening to the waterfall, the little blue flowers blowing in the artificial breeze.  
  
“You can come back here whenever you want,” Sulu says, petting Kirk's hair. “I mean, of course you can, you're the captain, you can go wherever you want, but I just – it's okay with me if you come here, too. Like, if I was in a shitty mood, and wanted to get away from everyone, and you were here when I showed up? I wouldn't be mad or anything. I think I'd like it.”  
  
“Okay,” Kirk says. This will be the best day of his life until that happens. 


	6. Chapter 6

It's springtime on Earth, and Kirk feels it in his bones, a new optimism stirring in his crew, everybody pairing off and those who are already together going a little moony. The last person he expects to be affected is Spock, and when Spock asks to meet with him in conference room 7-R after their shift, Kirk expects him to talk about work for a few hours, or his leave needs for an upcoming Vulcan holiday.   
  
“Captain,” Spock says instead when they're seated across from each other. “As you know, we are approaching the fourth year of our mission, during which we will visit the Petrachian galaxy and complete a three-month diplomatic and scientific study of the regional planets.”   
  
“Damn, it is four years already?” Kirk says. “When'd that happen?” A seed of worry blooms in his chest at the thought that he's running out of time with Sulu, who probably has goals for his life after the five-year mission that don't involve staying at Kirk's side. Kirk is so preoccupied by this line of thought that he almost misses Spock asking if, while in Petrach, it might be possible to have the exploration of the legendarily beautiful planet Civron coincide with a five day shore leave during which Spock would like to marry Uhura.  
  
“Wait, what?” Kirk says, his smile coming slowly. “You two are engaged?”  
  
“We are in fact, and this visit to Civron would allow both Uhura's family and my father to attend –”  
  
“Spock! Shit! Congratulations!” Kirk hops up from his chair and embraces Spock, laughing and slapping Spock's back. For some reason, this seems like a fortuitous turn of events when it comes to his own situation, as if Kirk will be able to point to Spock and Uhura as an example if Sulu tries to bolt.   
  
After accepting Spock's invitation to serve as his best man during the ceremony, Kirk hurries to his quarters to tell Sulu the news. Sulu isn't there, which is more distressing than it probably should be. It's the first time Kirk has felt as if a thing that he's experienced doesn't count until he can tell Sulu about it.  
  
When Sulu comes back, Kirk bounds into the front room to tell him about the upcoming wedding of Spock and Uhura, but he stops himself when he sees Sulu's face. He's stricken and quiet, avoiding Kirk's eyes and shuffling in the front lobby.   
  
“What the hell's wrong?” Kirk asks, feeling guilty for the fact that he's irritated by Sulu's apparent bad mood. Kirk had been ready to celebrate. Sulu looks up at him, his eyebrows arching.   
  
“I got a message from Pavel's father,” Sulu says. “They were supposed to meet up when we visited the Petrachian galaxy. His father is there doing research. He, uh. He wants to meet me.”   
  
“Shit,” Kirk says, crushed by this news, as if Chekov will be there, too, and will reclaim Sulu completely. Kirk steps forward and holds his arms out, not sure what Sulu really needs from him right now. Sulu frowns but steps closer, letting Kirk wrap his arms around him.   
  
“I don't know what I'll tell his father,” Sulu says. “I don't know what he wants from me. Apparently Pavel talked about me all the time.” He steps away from Kirk, who lets him go.   
  
“Of course he did,” Kirk says. “And his father just wants to meet the guy his son loved. Don't stress about it too much. It'll probably be – nice.”   
  
Sulu gives Kirk a wounded look, and Kirk starts to feel the way he always does when Chekov sneaks back into their lives, like there are no right answers or appropriate responses, there's just the fact that he's here and Chekov is gone, and it's always going to get held against him.   
  
“Will you come with me?” Sulu asks, and it's pretty much the last thing Kirk expected him to say.   
  
“Of course,” Kirk says, his hand sliding across Sulu's back. Sulu sighs heavily and nods to himself. For the rest of the night, Kirk treats Sulu like he's getting over a cold, bringing him food and wrapping him in blankets. They turn all the lights off before having sex in Kirk's bed, and Sulu's noises are a little softer than they usually are, his kisses more hungry. There's nothing, nothing Kirk loves more than this feeling: being needed by someone who he needs just as badly. He holds Sulu under the blankets until he's snoring. It's ridiculous, but Kirk is already thinking of this meeting with Chekov's father as a bed of coals that Sulu will have to walk across. Kirk wants to carry him over it, barefoot and smiling through the pain.   
  
Kirk doesn't even think to worry about how this might fuck things up between him and Sulu until a few days before the scheduled meeting, on a space station that's crowded with tourist restaurants and outlet shops. He has a bad dream about Chekov's father having him arrested for killing Chekov, and Sulu sobbing and accusing him of lying all this time, concealing the murder.   
  
“I'm afraid of this guy,” Sulu admits when they're shuttling to the space station. “He's a genius physicist, too, and when he was young he was a competitive skier. Pavel worshiped him.”   
  
“What about Pavel's mother?” Kirk asks. “His parents were still together when I – told them. You know, when I told them what happened.” Kirk barely remembers the conversation, which came directly after a horrible one with Harrison's sobbing wife and children. All he remembers about Chekov's parents is that they were quiet and somber, as if they'd already guessed why the captain of the _Enterprise_ wanted to speak with them and had prepared themselves. Chekov's mother cried, and his father held her.   
  
“His mom's doing research somewhere else,” Sulu says. “Get this.” He elbows Kirk. “She's a xenobotanist.”   
  
“Of course,” Kirk says, annoyed by this.   
  
“Those were some of the first conversations me and Pavel had,” Sulu says, his eyes glazing over in a way that they haven't in awhile, a smile frozen on his face. “He found out about the work I was doing in the botany labs and we talked about his mom's research. I'd actually written a paper about her work with larch vines while I was at the Academy.”  
  
“Neat,” Kirk says, beginning to fidget. He's prepared himself for a Chekov's Greatest Hits kind of weekend, but even after almost two years without him, Sulu is not just nostalgic but devoted. It's the way his face changes when Chekov's name comes up: suddenly he's talking about a thing worthy of protection, and something Kirk couldn't possibly comprehend.   
  
They've arranged to meet Dr. Andrei Chekov at a restaurant that he apparently recommends. Kirk is nervous about what exactly will transpire, but Sulu is positively shaken, as if he'll have to confront Chekov's ghost and explain to it his death. Kirk pats Sulu's back a lot, but Sulu doesn't seem to notice, just wrings his hands, sweaty and white-faced.   
  
“He's not going to like me,” Sulu says when they're in sight of the restaurant.  
  
“Yeah, he will.”   
  
“No – Pavel was more like his mother, he always said so. She – she has this great sense of humor, and she's sweet like he was, but in this way that makes you feel guilty because you know she's forgiving you for how dumb she thinks you are? But his father is the scary one, he makes his students sing opera if they say something unintelligent in his class –”  
  
“If he tries to get you to sing opera, I'll save you,” Kirk says. “I'll fake an emergency call on my communicator.”  
  
“He'd see through that,” Sulu says, as if this is actually a plan that they're going to need to use.  
  
They're able to spot Andrei Chekov fairly quickly; there aren't many humans on this station who aren't in Federation uniform. Andrei is wearing a rumpled yellow shirt with the top two buttons undone, and he's frowning down at the news on his PADD as Sulu and Kirk approach. He doesn't look like Chekov, mercifully; he's bulky and bearded, his hair going gray. He looks up when he sees Kirk's shadow across his PADD, and Kirk is relieved to see that Andrei's eyes are brown and serious, not a trace of Pavel's soft green light in them.   
  
“Sir,” Kirk says, stepping forward and offering his hand. “Captain James Kirk. And this is my pilot, Lieutenant Sulu.” He'll never tire of describing Sulu as something that belongs to him, in this only way that he ever can.   
  
“Ah, good, okay,” Andrei says, standing. They all shake, and Kirk keeps an eye on Sulu, hoping he won't faint, but suddenly Sulu seems stony and collected, rising to the occasion as usual.   
  
“I thank you for doing this,” Andrei says once they're seated. “I know you are both busy men. I noticed on my calendar the date I had set aside to meet my Pavel.” He pauses, not growing emotional, just allowing the name its required gravity. “I wanted to mark the day somehow, and Pavel talked so highly of you, it saddened me to think we should never meet.”   
  
“I was glad to come, sir,” Sulu says. “Pavel spoke very highly of you, too, and often. The same goes for his mother – is she doing okay?”  
  
Andrei makes a sound like a sudden gust of wind, exasperated, and lifts his hands.   
  
“We have not spoken in months,” he says. “We are separated. The stress of what happened – too much.”  
  
“I'm so sorry to hear that,” Sulu says. He sneaks Kirk a desperate look, begging him to change the subject.   
  
“Pavel was an exceptional officer, sir,” Kirk says, feeling blurty and ridiculous, wanting to just sit in silence while the two of them exchange Chekov stories. “Though I'm sure you know that.”  
  
“Yes, the boy was exceptional in every way,” Andrei says, chuckling a little. “He knew it, too, eh?”  
  
“I actually found him to be quite humble,” Kirk says, though he's startled to realize that he doesn't really remember if this is true.   
  
“Humble for his captain, that's good,” Andrei says. He smirks and drinks from a tiny cup of espresso. “For his parents, no way. But, we indulged him. It was hard not to be charmed by him, even when he was petulant.”   
  
“That's true,” Sulu says. “We almost never fought. It was impossible to stay mad at him. Not that he ever – did anything – gave me reason to be mad –”  
  
“Huh, that's hard to believe!” Andrei says. “I taught him much of what he knew about physics and some other subjects, and I found him to be an infuriating student. Nothing was taken at my word, everything questioned. This was how I knew that he was a genius, but it can make for some frustrating lessons, you understand?”  
  
“Oh, sure,” Sulu says. He running his hands from his thighs down to his knees in way that makes Kirk want to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.   
  
“You know that you were Pavel's first serious – boyfriend,” Andrei says, struggling with the word, either because his Standard is imperfect or because he still can't wrap his mind around the fact that his little boy could have had such a thing. “We were very worried when he told us that he was having this relationship a fellow officer – the pilot from his shift, even! We told him he was crazy and to end it all, ha, did you know you had these enemies back on Earth?”  
  
“Yeah – he mentioned some stuff,” Sulu says, clearly embarrassed. “That's okay. I understand – we both had hesitations at the beginning.”  
  
“But it was not to be stopped, hmm?” Andrei says, running his finger through some sugar that's spilled on the tabletop. “He was very headstrong. If he decided he was going to have a – love affair with his pilot, there was no stopping him. We were afraid he would be hurt by an older man, but he would tell us about the things you did for him, and we said to ourselves, 'what were we thinking? Of course Pasha will be as good at hanging on to his boyfriends as he is at everything else.'”   
  
“Like – what things did he tell you about?” Sulu asks, leaning a little closer to Andrei, as if some essence of Chekov surrounds him, and of course it does. “Things that I did?”   
  
“Ah, let's see. Well, something about growing plants for him, and cooking them up? He said you were a botanist?”  
  
“Oh – no, I'm not really, I mean, just an amateur, and I help out with some of the botany research on the ship, on a volunteer basis, then I have my own research –”  
  
“His mother used to do this for him, you know, but as a child, he hated it, being forced to eat fruit and vegetables that came from the dirty earth. He wanted everything from the replicator. They had many disagreements about this.”  
  
“He never told me that,” Sulu says. He's grinning, and Kirk knows they'll be here for awhile, that it will take a long time for Sulu and Andrei to tire of talking about Pavel.   
  
They end up sitting at the restaurant for almost five hours, and leave only because the owners are trying to close up. Kirk is sleepy and heartsick, watching Sulu glow and laugh with Andrei in a way that Kirk hasn't seen him do since before Chekov died. The two of them talk about everything, not just Chekov: physics, botany, the Federation, fencing, Russian food. It's clear that Sulu would have been welcomed into Chekov's family, that he would have truly belonged there. Kirk tries to envision Sulu meeting his mother years after Kirk's death. They would both be bitter and guarded, wouldn't even make it through a cup of coffee before making excuses about needing to leave.   
  
In the shuttle on the way back, Sulu is silent, and Kirk doesn't try to disturb his private reflection. It's as if Sulu eventually forgot that Kirk was sitting at the table, and that he'd ever needed him there to see him through the encounter. When they get back to Kirk's quarters, Kirk goes straight for the bed, but Sulu paces around for awhile, then finally stands in the doorway of the bedroom and clears his throat.  
  
“I think I'm going to sleep in Pavel's old room,” he says, his voice hoarse from talking and laughing. Only at one point during their conversation did Andrei and Sulu grow emotional. It was when they remembered Chekov's long-held grief over allowing Spock's mother to die.  
  
“You know,” Sulu says, shrugging when Kirk stares. “Just. I need to think and – I don't feel tired.”  
  
“It's okay,” Kirk says, and of course it is, even though, really, it isn't. He was looking forward to getting Sulu back at last after allowing him to return to Chekov for most of the day.   
  
“Take as much time as you need,” Kirk says, and Sulu nods.   
  
“Thanks,” he says, like Kirk has granted him a personal day, and he leaves without even coming into the bedroom, without touching Kirk, without goodbye.  
  
*  
  
Sulu sleeps in Chekov's old room for two days, and when he returns to Kirk's quarters, Kirk ignores him, pretending to do so unintentionally. If Sulu addresses him directly, he responds, even smiles. Every time their eyes meet Kirk tries his best to find new ways to say, _Do I give a fuck? Nope!_ , cheerful and sharp. He arranges their schedules so that they're never in bed at the same time, no chance of sex. Sulu's walls go up quickly in response, and he pretends not to notice any of this.   
  
"I fed the fish," Sulu says one night when Kirk comes back from shift late, walking a little unsteadily. He went to Bones' office to have a whiskey with him, and when Bones was nowhere to be found, he had some of Bones' whiskey alone, paging through Sulu's complete medical file, which he has now memorized: at eight years old, Sulu had his appendix removed, at fifteen he broke his arm, at nineteen he was prescribed Deximark to help him sleep, likely to help him cope with the aftermath of the overdose, which was not on his record. At twenty-four, he entered mandatory therapy to cope with the loss of his boyfriend. Six months later, he was treated for mild pollen intoxication. Two months after that, he required sutures in his left leg after being wounded by an arrow on an away mission. Three weeks ago he had his annual checkup, and the only note Bones made was of a fading bruise over his right hipbone, one that Kirk gave him in bed.   
  
"You fed the fish," Kirk says, dumping his PADD on the front table. "Okay. Great. Haven't you got a shift in two minutes?"  
  
"Yeah," Sulu says, trying hard not to sound angry, failing. "I just wanted you to know that so that you don't overfeed them and kill them."   
  
"I think I can take care of my own fucking fish, Lieutenant, but thanks. You could have just messaged me."   
  
He can feel Sulu staring at him, but he doesn't turn to look, just pulls his uniform shirt off over his head and walks into the bedroom. Sulu mutters something as he leaves, but Kirk doesn't ask him to repeat himself. He hears the front door open and close and crumples onto the bed, taking a deep breath full of the smell of Sulu that lingers on the sheets. It's not as strong as it once was, too inextricably linked with the scent of his own skin now.   
  
Kirk can't sleep, so he showers and wanders through his rooms, looking for evidence of how Sulu spent his day here. He checks the 'viewed' folder on the data screen to see which programs Sulu watched, and laughs when he finds that one of them is a short pornographic film about a police officer who lets a young man suck him off to avoid getting a ticket. The other is a half-hour long demonstration on how to breed Eastern Pliany flowers, and Kirk actually finds this one more arousing, because the hands of the scientist who demonstrates the technique remind him of Sulu's, and the careful way he handles his plants. The arousal fades to depression and Kirk flicks off the television. Even now, living together, he's still just spying on Sulu, out in the cold, looking in through the frosted windows. He mopes around a little longer, picking up Sulu's empty tea cups and trying to read his fortune in the soggy leaves before putting the cups back where he left them.   
  
A week later, this is still going on, and Kirk keeps wanting to take Sulu by the shoulders and ask him why the hell he hasn't just run off to Chekov's room. It's like he'd rather make Kirk feel uncomfortable than leave him alone, which could be interpreted in a number of ways. Kirk tries not to obsess, using work as a coping mechanism as usual, putting in overtime that makes his back ache. Sulu spends a lot of time at the gym. They're polite to each other on the bridge, and Kirk worries that the others will know it's an act.   
  
Eventually it becomes too tiring to sustain, and Kirk allows their shift to end at the same time one night. They get into the lift together, ignoring each other, Kirk muttering with Spock and Sulu holding his PADD with both hands, typing with his thumbs. It makes him seem very young, his shoulders hunched and the screen pulled close to his face, and Kirk watches him out of the corner of his eye.   
  
When they get back to Kirk's quarters, they continue to pretend that they're occupying this space in different dimensions, and Kirk waits for Sulu to put on his gym clothes and disappear, but he just follows Kirk into the bedroom and starts pulling off his uniform. Kirk does the same, wondering which of them will lose his nerve first, and when they're down to their underwear Sulu comes at him so hard that Kirk gets the wind knocked out of him as Sulu tackles him to the bed.   
  
He wants Sulu to fuck him, something that's deeply distressing for reasons he doesn't want to think about, and he rolls Sulu over to get the idea out of his head, wrestling him onto his back. Sulu doesn't try to fight his way back on top, just grinds his hips up to meet Kirk's possessive drags, groaning into Kirk's mouth as Kirk licks him open. Kirk rips Sulu's underwear down, wets his fingers and pushes into him roughly, using his other hand to press Sulu's shoulder to the mattress as he arches and moans.  
  
"Fuck yeah," Sulu grinds out, snapping his eyes open to meet Kirk's as if he's issuing a dare. His hips are still working as Kirk opens him, and he needs more, Kirk can see it in the dark of his eyes, the set of his mouth. He's needed this bad, has gone to bed feeling like an unscratched itch, hating Kirk for not fucking him. Kirk groans and leans down to kiss Sulu, letting him bite and suck at his bottom lip.   
  
"Gonna fuck you hard, Lieutenant," Kirk promises, and Sulu nods. The separation when Kirk goes to the bedside table for lube is painful, and Sulu pulls Kirk back eagerly when he crawls onto the bed again, sealing their mouths together. This hurts, too, kissing Sulu like he's drawing breath, remembering how good it feels to be kept alive only by this.  
  
Kirk buries his forehead against the mattress as he leans over Sulu's shoulder, fucking him in sharp, deep snaps of his hips, his hands fisted in the sheets. He can hear the pained grit of Sulu's teeth as he moans and takes it, his nails biting into Kirk's shoulders.   
  
"You like that?" Kirk breathes out, lifting his face to press it to Sulu's, not quite looking into his eyes. He's fucking Sulu the way he wants to be fucked, like he's a prizefighter stuck on the ropes, taking blow after blow. Sulu's hands slide down to Kirk's ass.   
  
"Jim," Sulu says, and Kirk wasn't expecting that, or the desperation Sulu snuck into his name. Kirk holds Sulu's face and kisses him with his eyes open, licking against his teeth, the tip of his tongue. They just watch each other for a minute, breathing hard, both of them waiting for something that's not quite an apology, or waiting to know how to offer one themselves. Sulu clenches around Kirk's cock, making a little whining noise that shatters all the way down Kirk's spine, and it feels good, being shattered by him.   
  
He frames Sulu's head with his elbows and fucks him even harder, faster now, both of them grunting out curses, Sulu's hands everywhere, his fingers braced in the crack of Kirk's ass as he pulls at him, urging him in deeper and wilder, biting at Kirk's earlobe when he can find it with his teeth. Sulu screams through his orgasm, humping it out against Kirk's stomach, and his ass gets so tight around Kirk's cock when he comes that Kirk thinks he'll die of it. That's what his own orgasm feels like, a happy death, the end.   
  
They have the excuse of being wrecked afterward, worn out and blown apart, so they don't need to talk. Kirk rolls toward Sulu and he follows Kirk's lead, putting his forehead against Kirk's and breathing hotly over Kirk's mouth. Kirk is moved by the dampness of Sulu's hair, and the way his hand flops uselessly against Kirk's chest, more of an impulse than a touch. When Kirk regains the ability to move he picks up Sulu's hand and kisses between his knuckles, licking over the little scars.   
  
"I want to be there every time if you fight someone," Kirk says, and Sulu smiles a little, his eyes still closed.  
  
"Do you remember Yrista?" Kirk asks. "When that guy slapped Pavel and you went nuts?"  
  
If they don't talk about Chekov now, they'll just fall into the same pattern again and again. Kirk has to break it, has to keep being the one who kicks down the walls, because it's what Sulu needs. Sulu is counting on him to do this, even if he doesn't want to know it.   
  
"Yeah," Sulu says, his eyes opening and sneaking up to Kirk's. "He got so mad at me for that. I guess I understood why. But it wasn't like I thought he couldn't handle himself. I didn't even have a thought process. I just did it, I blinked and suddenly I was on top of the guy. I never wanted to stop hitting him. I guess that's a problem I have. When I was fifteen I picked this fight with my sister's boyfriend, 'cause he'd cheated on her, and he was about twice my size, fucking broke my arm. I think I'm still trying to reenact that fight, always looking for the chance to win it. That day, when that guy hit Pavel – you had to pull me off, and I thought you would throw me off your crew for being unprofessional. When you didn't –" Sulu smirks. "I seriously thought you let me stay only as a favor to Pavel."   
  
Kirk laughs and hugs Sulu to him. They lie like that for awhile, catching their breath, letting the Chekov story settle around them. It seems to fit comfortably, for once.   
  
"I was so impressed with you that day," Kirk says. "Even though I knew I shouldn't have been. I think I tend to trust people who lose their shit when they get pushed hard enough. Like Spock, that time he almost killed me on the bridge? I looked at him differently after that. I was proud of him for being able to let go. Maybe that's me projecting my own shit, like I need everybody else to be unstable, too."   
  
"Human, you mean."   
  
"Yeah, I guess. Half-human, at least."   
  
They sleep there, in the middle of the bed, several feet from the pillows, afraid to let each other go.   
  
*  
  
Spock's wedding is a much bigger deal than Kirk anticipated. It's the first Vulcan wedding since the destruction of the home planet, and the half-Vulcan who's doing the marrying is hitching himself to a human, which has caused some political unrest. Uhura is stressed and trying to match Spock's seeming calm, but Kirk would be he's in turmoil, too, despite the poker face. When the shuttle bearing the wedding party, attendants, and guests finally reaches Civron, the serene oceans and pale blue skies have a needed and instantaneous calming effect, the sweet breeze that blows across the landing pad enough to make interspecies politics seem very far away and mostly inconsequential. Uhura smiles up at Spock as the locals circle their necks with necklaces made from local wildflowers.   
  
"It's supposed to be the most beautiful planet known to the Federation," Kirk says to Sulu as they walk toward their hotel, the breeze picking up and blowing Sulu's bangs from his forehead. Kirk has never seen him look better, and maybe it's just the setting, but the last few weeks on the ship have been so good. Sulu has been developing this particular laugh that Kirk has never seen him succumb to with anyone else. There are looks he gave Chekov that he'll never give Kirk, but Kirk is starting to realize that Sulu is inventing new things for him, not just avoiding the old ones. This laugh that Kirk is so fond of involves Sulu looking about nine years old, usually lying on his side, sometimes on his back, his shoulders bouncing and his eyes pinching up, quiet at first before the laughter bubbles out of him, low and goofy and uncontrollable. It happens most often when he's trying to tell Kirk a story and Kirk starts laughing before Sulu can get to the real punchline.   
  
"Damn," Sulu says when they reach their room. "Spock went all out."   
  
"Uh-huh," Kirk says, not bothering to tell Sulu that it was him who made sure they got rooms in this, the best hotel on the planet. Uhura deserves it after what she's been through in the past weeks, accused of sabotaging the recovery of a species. Spock and Uhura have the best room in the place, but Kirk made sure to get a good one for him and Sulu, too, and it's better than he expected. Everything is white marble and dark wood, the french doors that lead out to the big deck that overlooks the ocean open, gauzy curtains blowing in the breeze, a little waterfall tinkling into the pool out on the deck. Kirk is kind of embarrassed, actually, seeing it in person, which is probably the real reason he doesn't want to own up to reserving the place himself. Sulu is laughing, going from room to room, opening all the closets to marvel at their size.   
  
"God, are you sure they didn't give us the honeymoon suite by mistake?" Sulu asks, and Kirk laughs self-consciously. This is the last relaxed destination the _Enterprise_ will visit during the fourth year of her mission, and maybe he did have something like a honeymoon in mind, just in case they don't get another chance. The fifth year of the mission will be harrowing, a trip through the Grotliun galaxy that's far more dangerous than anything they've faced so far, and then there's the fact that Sulu might leave him when the mission ends anyway.   
  
They sit on the floor in front of the well-stocked mini-bar and go through the contents like kids on Halloween, pointing out the things they've tried, the ones they know they hate, their favorites, and the mystery bottles from planets they haven't visited yet. This leads naturally to dares, and in under an hour they're both red-faced from laughing at each other's reactions to the various drinks, which leads naturally to sex on the floor, both of them still laughing deep in their chests as they kiss, their ribs trembling with it.   
  
"So fucking happy," Kirk murmurs against Sulu's lips when they're through. They're half-naked on the floor, pants pushed down, shirts pushed up, the sound of guests gathering for the ceremony beginning to waft up from the main pool deck as the sun goes down outside. Sulu grins and pulls Kirk's bottom lip slowly between his teeth.  
  
"Yep," he says, and his smile is brand new, something he invented for Kirk, or maybe Kirk's just drunk.   
  
Civron is like a drug, and even Bones is cheerful during the reception, his arm slung easily around Chapel's shoulders and his hips swaying a little when music plays. Kirk is drunk enough to want to dance for real, but Sulu is too embarrassed to try it, so Kirk steals Uhura from her relatives and pulls her out to the dance floor. She gives him a petulant look, then grins and lets him twirl her. Her dress is simple and elegant, and Kirk knows shit all about women's clothing, but it feels like it's made of silk.   
  
"Thank you for this," she says when he pulls her back.   
  
"As if I did anything."  
  
"Captain. I know it was your sway that got us in here. I would have gotten married in a bog if I had to, but – this is really nice. Just let me thank you, alright?"  
  
"If you must." Kirk gives her a little dip and she laughs. It's good to see her happy like this, the strain of what she's had to face recently no longer lining her features. They both turn to look at Spock, who is deep in conversation with himself, the older Spock clasping his hands behind his back in a way that mirrors his younger counterpart's.   
  
"What's that like?" Kirk asks. "Knowing what your man will look like when he's old?"  
  
"It's – comforting, in a strange way," Uhura says. "And a little weird."   
  
"I'll bet. Hey, I've always wondered – back at the Academy, who did the seducing? You, or the Spock-ster?"   
  
Uhura gives him a look, then smiles in a way that makes Kirk nervous.   
  
"You want to answer the same question about you and Sulu?" she asks.   
  
"Do you really need to ask?" Kirk says with a snort. "It was me, of course."   
  
"Really?" Uhura shrugs. "I had my money on him."   
  
"Yeah? Why?"  
  
"Because of the way he talked about you."   
  
"Huh?" Kirk stops dancing, and Uhura laughs, then frowns a little, her hands on her hips.   
  
"You guys have been together for – what? A year? Longer?" Uhura shakes her head and takes Kirk's hand again, but he still can't seem to move. "It's still news that he once talked about you?" Uhura says, making him sway a little. "For a couple of months there you were _all_ he talked about. I tried not to intervene, just listened – I knew he felt guilty for falling in love again after losing Chekov, and he _never_ would have called it that, but he would get so infuriated over these little things you did, then he would pretend to fret that he was keeping you from having a social life." She rolls her eyes, the band's song changing from soft pop to bluegrass.   
  
"You – what –" Kirk isn't sure what he's trying to ask. He looks over at Sulu, who is laughing with Scotty, being coerced into trying some of whatever Scotty is drinking. Sulu winces at the taste and searches for Kirk while Scotty laughs. He grins when their eyes meet, and lifts his hand to wave.  
  
"He loves you so much," Uhura says softly, looking at Sulu. "I was looking though the pictures on his PADD one day when we were hanging out in his room, old pictures of Chekov and pictures of his sisters, more pictures of flowers than any one person should have, and there was this one called 'kirk lol' or something like that, this picture of you from one of the Halloween parties, wearing this stupid pirate hat, and you know how I hate to stroke your ego, Captain, but it was the cutest picture. Something about the lighting made your eyes look really blue. You had the dorkiest little smile, and just – I thought – well. It seemed like a weird one for him to save in the midst of all these personal pictures, because this was back before you guys were together, so I right-clicked on it to check the views, you know, out of curiosity, and, um. He'd opened that picture – a lot."   
  
"I have to –" Kirk says, backing out of her grip, and Uhura smiles, rolling her eyes a little.   
  
"I should have known to tell you all of this sooner," she says. "Silly me for thinking you'd figure it out on your own. Goodnight, Captain, and thanks again."   
  
Kirk hurries across the crowded dance floor, feeling dizzy. The wind has picked up, and he has a sudden, irrational fear that a storm will come and blow them all into the ocean. It's just that the idea of Sulu keeping secret pictures of him is too unreal, and he's got to get to Sulu before the forces of the universe conspire to end this impossibly good thing.   
  
"Want to go up to the room?" Kirk blurts when he reaches the table where Sulu is sitting, Scotty's mouth still hanging open around whatever he was in the middle of saying.   
  
"You'd better, Hikaru," Gaila says, leaning onto Scotty's shoulders. "Captain looks pretty serious."  
  
Kirk shoots her a look, and she winks. He looks back to Sulu, who's standing slowly, his eyebrows raised.  
  
"Uh, sure," Sulu says. He turns back to Gaila and Scotty. "Night, guys."  
  
They're some of the first to leave, the cake still uncut, but Kirk already gave his toast, something that was well-received by the humans in attendance. As far as the Vulcans, he couldn't really tell what they thought, aside from old Spock, who laughed as if he was charmed. All of that feels like it happened a long time ago, as if it transpired in some previous era, before his conversation with Uhura.  
  
"Are you okay?" Sulu asks, squeezing Kirk's hand as he fumbles to get the door of their room open.   
  
"Yeah," Kirk says. "We can – we can go back down in a minute, if you want, I just – have to, um –"  
  
He hoists Sulu up on the way to the bed, and Sulu laughs into his mouth, his arms around Kirk's shoulders and his legs tight around Kirk's waist. Kirk expected Sulu to be heavier, but he's got streams of adrenaline coursing through him now, the words _He loves you so much_ playing on a loop in his head like a soft base line from the party below. The French doors are still open, and they're both quiet as they make out on the bed, pushing aside clothing, popping buttons.   
  
"I'm kind of drunk," Sulu says, laughing, and Kirk leans up onto his hands to look down at him. Sulu watches him curiously, running his hands up and down Kirk's arms as if to tell him to get moving again.  
  
"What?" Sulu says.   
  
"Nothing," Kirk says. "I just." He drops down to kiss Sulu before he can say anything that would ruin the moment. He wants everything to continue feeling as easy and soft as the breeze through the open doors, doesn't want to rest the weight of any words he can't take back on Sulu's shoulders.   
  
They didn't have time to shower before dressing and hurrying down to the ceremony, and Sulu is still wet and open enough from earlier to take Kirk without lube. Kirk likes it this way, because it's an excuse to stay close and take it slow, his face hidden against Sulu's neck as he moves in him with careful, languid rolls of his hips. Outside, thunder rolls in, and they hear the shrieks of the scattering party guests before the rain starts splattering their third-floor patio, coming down in a irregular plunks at first, and then harder, spraying into the room. Kirk doesn't stop to shut the doors, just leans up to lock eyes with Sulu as he fucks him slow, studying Sulu's face. Sulu smiles a little, looking sleepy, his moans growing deeper and louder as the thunder moves in closer, providing cover. There are still a few guests outside, laughing drunkenly in the rain, plates clattering as the caterers hurry to put everything away.   
  
"Feel so fucking good," Kirk whispers, kissing the words onto Sulu's cheeks. Sulu sighs, dragging his short nails up Kirk's arms and over his shoulders, laughing when Kirk shivers.   
  
"Harder, man," Sulu says. He braces his feet on the mattress and pushes his hips up to meet Kirk's downward thrust, making Kirk moan.   
  
"Not yet," Kirk says, pinning Sulu's shoulders. "Wanna be in you all night."   
  
Sulu sighs like he'll consent to this, grinning and letting his head loll back, his eyes closed. Kirk licks Sulu's neck, tasting himself there, the parts of him that have bled into Sulu's skin. The rain smells so good, like everything else on this planet, and the thunder sounds like a lullaby, though it's really no different from the kind they've got on Earth.   
  
Even when they're through, Sulu's come on both their chests, Kirk's leaking from Sulu, they don't shut the doors. The rain is still steady but the wind has eased up, and nothing is really wet except the curtains, doors, and part of the floor. The whole place could flood and Kirk would have a hard time pulling away from Sulu's half-awake kisses, his hands up under Kirk's unbuttoned shirt.   
  
"Tell me how much you love it when I fuck you," Kirk says, delirious. Sulu grins, then laughs.   
  
"You know I love it," Sulu says, actually managing a blush. His eyes are so blown, like he's still getting off, just on this, feeling Kirk's come sliding between his thighs while they paw at each other lazily.   
  
"You could – we could switch it up if you want," Kirk says, a tightness pinching up in his chest. "Sometimes, you know. If you want to."  
  
"Yeah?" Sulu leans in, kissing the highest point of Kirk's forehead as an excuse to hide his eyes. Kirk knows why Sulu hasn't tried it until now. That was what he had with Chekov. It wouldn't be the same with Kirk.  
  
"Yeah," Kirk says, because he might not reach this place again, where he's not afraid to ask for this. "I, uh. Haven't – not since I was fourteen, those first few times with my brother's friends. I thought I would always hate it, you know? And I never wanted it bad enough to try it again. But, uh. If you – I think I'd like it. If it were you."   
  
Sulu studies him for a moment, his eyebrows arching. Kirk hopes Sulu can see it, how much he needs this, not to erase what Sulu had with Chekov but to overwrite his own bad memories. That first time, with Tommy Vance grunting behind him, his face pressed into Tommy's unwashed sheets, the obscene quiet of the rest of the house – he tried to undo it with Pete Macavee, but that was worse, up against the back wall of the barbecue restaurant where they ran into each other, that sickeningly sweet smell clogging the late summer air. Pete tried to jerk Kirk off while he fucked him and apologized when Kirk couldn't even get hard, his dick a limp, pathetic thing in Pete's hand. He feels himself shrinking down to nothing when he remembers it, and blinks back to the present, where Sulu is sitting up on his elbow, closing Kirk's shirt more snugly around him.  
  
"You cold?" he asks, cupping the back of Kirk's neck. Kirk shakes his head, but Sulu gets up and shuts the doors anyway, then the curtains. Kirk rolls onto his back and watches Sulu pad into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He shouldn't have asked for something that Sulu isn't ready to give, should be grateful for what he's got and keep his mouth shut. He thinks of Chekov's ghost holding on to this one last thing that Sulu won't give up, sobbing at the thought that Sulu might surrender it. He suddenly and powerfully wants to see Chekov, to assure him that Sulu is well taken care of, but Chekov would just scoff. In a lot of ways, Chekov was better equipped to take care of Sulu than Kirk ever will be. He was probably a virgin when they got together, soft and scared that first time. Sulu must have been so careful with him, whispering _shhh_ , rock hard for the way he trembled.   
  
Kirk has nightmares and wakes up distressed by the stillness outside, the rainstorm over. Sulu is sleeping on his stomach, snoring into his pillow, and Kirk feels itchy in his own skin, but too tired to get up and pace. He turns away from Sulu and huddles under the blankets, wishing he hadn't said anything about wanting to be fucked. He shuts his eyes and thinks of all the things that got put away forever after Sam died: the ball and glove that Kirk and his mother used to play catch, both of them hand me downs from Sam, and the virtual games that Kirk would play with Sam, their mother watching from the sofa, laughing along with them when one of them missed an easy jump or scored a particularly good bonus. Christmas, birthdays, dinner at the table, clean sheets every Sunday. Kirk would hate himself when he missed these things, because Sam couldn't ever have them again, so why should he?  
  
He wakes up feeling groggy, something tickling behind his ear. When he realizes that it's Sulu's tongue, the night's anxieties dissipate, and he turns onto his back, smiling against Sulu's lips as they press onto his.   
  
"Horny again?" Kirk says, laughing as Sulu licks into his mouth. "Jesus."   
  
"Shh," Sulu whispers, stroking Kirk's cheek with his thumb, and the few cracked pieces of Kirk's heart that he's managed to hang onto are snatched away in one easy handful. He blinks up at Sulu, searching his eyes. Sulu is serious and calm, still touching Kirk's face.   
  
Neither of them speaks, and there's a bubble of defensive little questions growing in Kirk's chest, but he won't let them out. Sulu has opened one of the doors that leads out to the patio, just enough to let the earliest morning light in, and he's got the lube ready, making Kirk wonder how long he's been awake, setting things in place. He kisses Kirk while he reaches down between his legs, wasting no time, somehow knowing that he shouldn't. Kirk sighs sharply into Sulu's mouth as those fingers work between his crack, and he holds onto Sulu's arm with one hand, fisting the front of his t-shirt with the other. Even the fact that Sulu left his t-shirt on is perfect, though Kirk couldn't say why.   
  
It doesn't hurt, though it doesn't feel amazing at first either, just like pressure and strain, unpleasant one minute and teasingly good the next. Sulu works in another finger and watches Kirk's face, his other hand in Kirk's hair. Kirk tries not to think about anything, and when Sulu crooks his fingers, it's not hard. Kirk arches like he's been electrocuted, shouting Sulu's name, wanting to feel that fire again. Sulu is testing him like a new element, soft swipes of his fingers that intensify as Kirk settles into the feeling, palming his cock absentmindedly, tilted back like this is how his body is supposed to work, the tense curve of his spine feeling as right as the wide spread of his legs.   
  
"Fuck, fuck," Kirk says, whining, too weak, but who cares, who cares. Sulu rubs him again and he screams.  
  
"No one ever?" Sulu says, and Kirk cries out, telling him, _No, no, never_.   
  
"I can hit this with my cock," Sulu says, brushing those electric fingertips over that same spot, and it's like _he_ put it there, like it's a treasure he was looking to hide. "If you want –"  
  
"Yeah, fuck, want it, yes, please." Kirk is still curved away from the mattress, his eyes pinched tight, and Sulu tries to soothe him but Kirk doesn't want to be calm, wants to be a live wire, ready to be plucked like a tight string, played in tense, tight notes that leave him trembling. Sulu won't let him stay tense, keeps petting him until he melts, Sulu's fingers still inside him, his tongue soft on Kirk's bottom lip.   
  
"This is my favorite part of you," Sulu says, tugging on Kirk's lip. "This and your eyes. And your arms. This, too," he says, reaching down to ghost his fingers over Kirk's cock. Kirk gives in and relaxes, letting out the breath he'd been holding, licking at Sulu's fingers when they press against his bottom lip. This is where he wants Sulu's hands always, two fingers in his ass and two in his mouth. God, he just wants Sulu to pull him apart. He closes his eyes and sucks, clenches, listens to Sulu moan.   
  
"You ready?" Sulu asks, pulling his fingers out slow. Kirk nods, dazed. He feels like he's dreaming as he watches Sulu slick his cock, his body buzzing with anticipation. They're both shaking when Sulu lines himself up, his hand on Kirk's bent knee. Sulu looks up at Kirk, just the head of his cock pushing against him, and Kirk begs with his eyes, feeling like he's waited fifteen years for this. Sulu sucks in his breath as he slides forward.   
  
It hurts, and Sulu stops when Kirk tenses, leaning down to lick and bite at his nipples until he relaxes again. Kirk's breath shudders in his chest, and he finds Sulu's elbows, pulling him forward, wanting more of that burn and stretch, wanting to get the painful part over with. Sulu groans and lifts his head, pressing his face to Kirk's neck as he slides in until his balls are snug against Kirk's body.   
  
"Fuck," Kirk says in a whisper, staring up at Sulu, who is panting already, breathing into Kirk's open mouth. It's like they've never been this close before, but of course they have. Kirk has fallen asleep inside Sulu, curled all around him.   
  
"Feel okay?" Sulu asks, the words pinched, and Kirk nods, though it still hurts a little. It's nothing like what he remembers, but he knew it wouldn't be. Sulu kisses him, his thumbs stroking over Kirk's temples, and Kirk tries to focus on breathing, refusing to think about how vulnerable he is, how full and open and completely contained in Sulu's hands. His cock leaks onto his stomach at the thought of what he must look like, spread open for Sulu, and he squeezes around Sulu's cock experimentally.  
  
"Yeah," Sulu says, breathing the word into Kirk's mouth. "So – fucking tight, Jim, God."   
  
"Told you, I haven't done this since I was fourteen."   
  
"I know," Sulu says, his eyes changing. He leans down to kiss Kirk, moving just slightly, and Kirk groans, his hands going to Sulu's hips. He doesn't need to be handled this gently, goddammit. Still, he doesn't want to stop kissing Sulu, even as Sulu begins to move inside him, just barely, teasing little rolls of his hips, so slow. Kirk groans and throws his head back, offering Sulu his neck. The scrape of Sulu's teeth over Kirk's pulse gets Kirk's hips moving, too, and the friction against the rim of his stretched hole is starting to feel really fucking good, making him move faster.   
  
"Like that?" Sulu asks, his voice hot in Kirk's ear, and Kirk nods, keeping his eyes closed, wanting to hide inside himself while he's like this, feeling again like a hollow boy who'd do anything to be filled. He winds his arms around Sulu's neck and holds on tight as Sulu begins to pick up the pace, fucking him deeper, faster. Kirk wails at the feeling, holding his legs open around Sulu's body, his thighs trembling. When Sulu grabs Kirk's thighs and presses them to his sides, Kirk gives in and wraps his legs around the small of Sulu's back, squeezing him until he moans.   
  
"Goddamn," Sulu says, starting to lose control, his cock slamming into Kirk now. "You – you – here, let me –" He reaches under Kirk's ass and tilts him, leaning back, and Kirk can't keep his eyes closed now, he's watching Sulu as he flushes with concentration, his jaw tight and his eyes trained on Kirk's bouncing cock as he shifts around inside him until he finds what he was looking for.  
  
"Fuck!" Kirk screams, drawing the word out in a long, chest-clearing scream, his whole body arching as Sulu pounds that place that he teased with his fingers. Kirk moans and reaches for his cock, jerking himself in time with every hard thrust, seeing white, shaking like a madman. Sulu bats Kirk's hand away and takes control, grunting as he pulls on Kirk's cock and fucks him hard, using his other hand to hold Kirk's left thigh away from his body, opening him so wide, giving himself better access, making Kirk scream until he knows people can hear, but he doesn't care, doesn't care about anything except Sulu's fist on his cock and Sulu's dick slamming into him. He doesn't know what to do with his hands so he pulls fistfuls of his hair into them, tears streaming from his pinched up eyes as his orgasm climbs and peaks and rips out of him.   
  
"Hikaru!" he shouts as Sulu pumps him through it, wanting everyone in the hotel to hear, to know that Kirk is helpless for this, reduced to a sobbing, shaking mess on Sulu's cock. Sulu groans and grabs Kirk's hips, tilting his ass further off the bed, nailing that spot while Kirk cries out wordlessly, fat beads of come still sliding down his cock.   
  
"Uh _hh_ ," Sulu moans when he comes, his voice deeper than Kirk has ever heard it, and he opens his eyes to see Sulu's body jerking as he pushes his orgasm into Kirk's body, his eyes closed and his head thrown back. Kirk moans at the sight, lifting his arms, and without even opening his eyes Sulu falls into them, sighing out curses as his hips continue to work, more weakly now. Kirk rubs his fingers through the damp hair at the nape of Sulu's neck, feeling drained, and full, too, because Sulu is still inside him.   
  
"So good," Kirk moans. He's never felt this mindless before in his life, and it's incredible, the best drug there is. Sulu grunts in agreement, his lips wet on Kirk's ear. Kirk wraps his whole body around Sulu's and rolls both of them onto their sides, remembering suddenly that he's bigger than Sulu. He laughs at the thought and nuzzles Sulu's face. Sulu's eyes open slowly, and he looks concerned, or guilty, like he didn't mean to do it that hard the first time. He kisses the tip of Kirk's nose.  
  
"Better?" he asks, his voice soft, and for a second Kirk doesn't know what Sulu is talking about, as if the past really has been erased, what they just did some form of actual time travel.   
  
"Better, yeah," Kirk says, and they kiss until Sulu's cock is soft enough to slide from Kirk's body, the sensation making him shudder and squirm closer.   
  
Outside, the sun rises higher, and there's noise from the first floor as hotel employees begin putting up umbrellas and setting out towels, followed by the shouts of the first children to explode out onto the pool deck. Kirk doesn't want to leave the room all day, and he's glad when Sulu seems to agree to this plan, lingering in bed for a long time before ordering room service breakfast. After they've eaten they go out onto the patio that's connected to their room to skinny dip in the shallow pool. Kirk's whole body feels brand new as the sun warms his skin and the water slides over it. Even the sting in his ass seems sacred as he pulls Sulu into his lap on the stairs of the pool.   
  
"Pretty nice place," Sulu says, straddling him. Kirk scoffs.  
  
"The best place ever," he says, and Sulu grins.  
  
"Why did Spock and Uhura get married, though?" he asks, moving over to sit beside Kirk and tip his head back, closing his eyes against the sun. "Are they that worried about might happen in the Grotliun system?"  
  
"I don't think that's it," Kirk says. "They just – I don't know. Why does anybody get married?"  
  
"Exactly," Sulu says, and it shouldn't feel like a knife in Kirk's chest, because it's not like he wants to marry Sulu, anyway. Though he probably wouldn't say no if Sulu asked.   
  
"What, you weren't going to marry Pavel?" Kirk says, and it's like strolling casually over a cliff, not understanding, once he's falling, why he couldn't just keep his goddamn eyes on the ground.   
  
"I don't know," Sulu says, seemingly unperturbed by Kirk's sudden cliff dive. "I guess I just don't see the point. If you love someone, stay with them. Have kids with them if you want. It just seems so antiquated, this idea that we should make contracts with the people we love. I mean, if we need marriage so much, why not have a ceremony pronouncing someone your official best friend? Right?"  
  
"I'm never getting married," Kirk says. It feels less like a decision and more like something he's just always known about himself.   
  
"Me either," Sulu says, pressing his shoulder more snugly against Kirk's, and it's like he just accepted Kirk's proposal. Kirk grins and leans over to kiss Sulu's neck. Even in the chlorinated water, they both smell like sex.   
  
They spend the whole day climbing in and out of the pool, switching between naked sunbathing and lazy skinny dipping. Kirk watches Sulu's skin darken as his own turns red, and they order grapes from room service so they can feed them to each other, laughing like idiots. The setting just seems to call for it. Below, on the main pool deck, there's music and splashing, but the rest of the world feels very far away.   
  
"Are you worried about the Grotliun system?" Kirk asks when they're back in the water again, Kirk with his arms stretched out along the edge of the little pool and Sulu floating in front of him, making him hard under the water.   
  
"Nah," Sulu says. "But ask me again when we're navigating those old Rasfla War minefields, or getting chased out of a jungle by some fascinating new species with advanced weaponry. I can't feel pessimistic about anything in this place, though." Sulu wraps his arms around Kirk's waist and presses against him, grinning. "I'm starting to suspect that they pump some chemical into that air that makes everything feel – you know."  
  
"Perfect?" Kirk says. He grabs Sulu's ass and pulls him closer with a moan, ready to get out of the sun for awhile, back into the bed. "Yeah, that's one way to get your planet the reputation for most beautiful in the universe. Drug everybody who sets foot there."  
  
Sulu laughs and kisses him, rubbing his stiffening cock against Kirk's thigh. Kirk feels about sixteen years old, the age when he realized he would be admired, that people would be willing to crumple into his arms if he reached for them. The feeling had quickly become hollow, and even at the start it was never anything like this, but the newness of the thing reminds him of that time in his life, when he went from scrawny to muscular, from a depressed kid to a smirking cynic. This is the opposite of what he loved about that transformation: getting bigger and stronger made him feel powerful, and this is powerlessness, but it's better, because he's only powerless where Sulu is concerned, and he's starting to think Sulu won't use it against him.   
  
Back in the shade of the room, Kirk drapes Sulu over the side of the bed and kneels down to blow him, watching Sulu's face. He's up on his elbows, open-mouthed, staring at Kirk's lips as they stretch around his cock, and Kirk is getting off on it, too, knowing that Sulu has fetishized certain parts of his body. He fucks Sulu afterward, sucking on Sulu's fingers as he does.   
  
"So, my favorite parts of you," Kirk says when they're lying together afterward, close to sleep. "In case you're wondering."  
  
"Tell me," Sulu says when Kirk pauses for dramatic effect. Sulu is lying on his stomach, his smile half-hidden in the pillow.   
  
"Your hands," Kirk says, "Obviously."  
  
"Obviously."  
  
"And this," Kirk says, running his fingers down Sulu's spine to cup his ass. "Especially when you're wearing civvies. 'Cause it would be uncaptainly of me to notice your ass when you're in uniform. And I like your hair, 'cause I can tell you've had this exact same haircut all your life. And your voice, everything about your voice. And your eyebrows."  
  
"My eyebrows?"  
  
"Yeah, they're so – serious? And I like the way you suck on ice."  
  
Sulu laughs, and Kirk flops himself onto Sulu's back, burying his face between Sulu's shoulder blades. In a minute, Bones will come knocking on the door asking them about dinner, and they'll have to scramble to get dressed, unless Bones has fallen under the spell of this place, too, in which case he might just stay naked in his room all day with Chapel.   
  
"Back to work tomorrow," Kirk says, wondering if he can order a bucket of ice from room service. He imagines pulling a piece of ice from Sulu's lips and trailing it all the way down his spine, between his ass cheeks –   
  
"You complaining?" Sulu says.  
  
"Huh?" Kirk has lost track of what they were talking about. He's pretty sure it wasn't ice-related.  
  
"About going back to work," Sulu says. "You complaining? Want to stay here with the honeymooners for the next three days?"  
  
"Nah," Kirk says, though he'd be all for it if there weren't hundreds of unread reports piling up on his desk as it is. "No need. We've got ice back on the ship, too."   
  
"What?" Sulu says, laughing.   
  
"Hand me my communicator, alright? I need to make a room service call."   
  
Bones doesn't come to the door, and Kirk has never been happier that his best friend has a bedmate of his own. He forgot to list Sulu's nipples among his favorite things, something he realizes as he makes a beeline for them with the ice, circling one and then the other before replacing the ice with the heat of his mouth. He's kind of surprised when no one comes to the door to politely inquire about the noises Sulu is making, but maybe hotels on Civron get this kind of thing all the time.


	7. Chapter 7

Back on the ship, things are busy but good, something that's been in frantic motion inside Kirk's chest for the past two years finally settling in to sleep for awhile. It makes him nervous at times, and he'll pause to try to remember what he should be worrying about, but it's not there when he goes to the place where he once kept it, and suddenly everything is okay.  
  
Kirk is always on the bridge for Sulu's shift, and usually hangs around with Spock for the first few hours of the beta shift that follows before going to visit Bones for a sick bay status report and some whiskey drinking. Neither of them talks about how happy they've been, because it's embarrassing, and because they're both a little superstitious about what they've found in Chapel and Sulu. Bones rants about Federation procedure and Kirk nods, drinking and thinking about where Sulu is during these conversations. He's usually at the gym practicing his fencing, and sometimes Kirk stops by on the way back to his quarters to watch, but more often he just goes back and gets in the shower, lingering under the water until Sulu arrives to join him.  
  
"You should come work out with me sometime," Sulu says one night while they're in the shower together, Kirk admiring the new strength in Sulu's shoulders, his soapy hands squeezing over them.  
  
"But when would I have my whiskey-drinking, Bones-ranting time?" Kirk says. He works out first thing in the morning, while the gym is being cleaned. It's one of the benefits and annoyances of being captain; he needs the whole place to himself or people would stop him like they do in the hallways, asking about shift changes and policy updates and doing some general ass-kissing while they're at it. It's getting harder to commit to his workouts lately, with Sulu under the blankets with him in the mornings, asking him to stay without words, his hand tight on Kirk's hip.  
  
The only worry that continues to nag at him is the room that once belonged to Chekov and the box of mementos that still lives there. He knows that Sulu stops there sometimes on his way back from the botany lab, in little pockets of time when he thinks that Kirk is too busy to notice. Kirk doesn't mind the fact that the Temple of Chekov still exists, or that Sulu wants to worship there alone. He just wishes that Sulu didn't feel like it has to be a secret.  
  
He's getting some work done on an off day when Sulu says something vague about going to the lab. Kirk knows where he's really going, and he doesn't look up from his data pad, only grunting in acknowledgement. Maybe some part of him wishes that Sulu didn't need to visit his memories of Chekov anymore, that the box could be put away, but he knows that's not the way it works, and he can be patient through the hours when Sulu is away from him. He usually comes back quiet and needy, and as Kirk approves leave requests he imagines Sulu coming back to the room, stretching out on top of Kirk and hugging his chest, needing to be held. Kirk will kiss his forehead and rub his back until the mood has passed, then they can have a fuck on the sofa, some dinner – everything will be fine.  
  
He looks up when he hears Sulu coming in, ready to receive his weight, to close him into his arms, not even sure what sort of expression to put on his face when he sees that Sulu is holding the box full of his Chekov things, staring at Kirk like he's trying to work up the nerve to tell him that his dog has been run over by a train.  
  
"I, uh," Sulu says. He clears his throat. "You probably need that room, so. This was the only thing left in there."  
  
"I don't need that room," Kirk says, a thousand frantic insect wings suddenly buzzing in his chest. "You can – if you need it – I mean, if you want, you can keep it – "  
  
"I don't need it," Sulu says, on the verge of getting angry, and Kirk understands slowly that he's missed the point. "That's what I'm telling you. I don't need it anymore. So." Sulu sits down on the end of the sofa, near Kirk's socked feet, and Kirk has a flashback to the last time this happened, Sulu sitting there with that box in his lap until he dropped to sleep on Kirk's shoulder.  
  
"Okay," Kirk says, panicked with the certainty that he's handling this wrong. "Okay, I'll, uh, I'll tell the assignments folks. Maybe there's an ensign who wants a private."  
  
Sulu says nothing, and Kirk approaches him cautiously, feeling as if he's traveled back in time to a year ago, even though Sulu is telling him that he wants to live here officially, with no sanctuary to run to except the one in the rec garden that he offered to share with Kirk. When Kirk is close enough he puts his arm around Sulu's shoulders and leans in to kiss his cheek. Sulu looks dejected, his arms tight around the box.  
  
"So," he says, lifting his face to Kirk's. The tired kiss he presses to Kirk's lips feels like the thing Kirk's been waiting for, proof that Sulu is on his side. "Want to – do you want to see what's in here?"  
  
"Yeah," Kirk says, though for some reason he's afraid to know. His arm drops down to the small of Sulu's back as he pulls open the box, and Kirk holds him tightly while he takes the objects out one at a time, showing them to Kirk and explaining why he kept them. There are a couple of old Russian novels, probably pretty valuable but well-worn, because apparently Chekov was romantic enough to want to read paper novels that had been handed down in his family for generations. There's a little knit hat that Sulu bought Chekov as a gift toward the beginning of their relationship, a stylus that's been chewed on one end, a pair of little clay cups designed for vodka drinking, Chekov's old PADD, and some birthday cards he gave to Sulu, one with a lock of Chekov's hair taped inside in a joking fashion. In Kirk's imagination, there was so much more in the box, whole libraries of Chekov artifacts, carefully cataloged exhibits with placards and glass cases. His throat tightens when Sulu comes to the last item in the box: a faded purple t-shirt that Chekov used to sleep in.  
  
"I forgot how small he was," Kirk says, unfolding the t-shirt and spreading it out on his legs, touching the frayed collar and the short sleeves.  
  
"Yeah," Sulu says, and Kirk can hear that he's trying not to cry, and also that he's lying: Sulu hasn't forgotten. He knows the dimensions of this t-shirt by heart.  
  
The things go back into the box, and Sulu sets it on a shelf on the half of Kirk's closet that has slowly become his. Kirk busies himself with getting food from the replicator, and doesn't nag Sulu for going to bed without eating. He eats a chicken sandwich in front of the news, flips through a few more pending work orders on his data pad, feeds the fish and shuts out the lights. He's afraid to go near Sulu, who's still in Chekov-space, so he lingers in the bathroom for a long time, brushing his teeth for a full two minutes and thinking about how Sam used to lie to their mother when she asked if they'd brushed. It was such a dumb thing to lie about, but Sam would be so triumphant when he got away with it, smiling at Kirk as if to remind him that he was the smart one.  
  
Kirk walks into the dark bedroom and shoves off his pants and boots, tossing his uniform shirt on a chair. He climbs into bed in his undershirt and boxer shorts, finding Sulu in the middle, on top of the blankets. Sulu is lying on his stomach, his face hidden in the pillow. He's not crying, but he's not okay.  
  
"I should have saved more things," Sulu says after they've both been silent awhile, listening to the aquarium gurgling in the other room.  
  
"Yeah?" Kirk scoots a little closer, pushing his hand into Sulu's hair. "Like what?"  
  
"His uniform shirt," Sulu says, like he's been thinking about this all night, making a list. "His running trophies. I sent those to his parents, but – now I wish I'd kept them. I don't know why. They'd just be there in that box. It's not like I'd – display them or anything."  
  
Kirk wraps his arm fully around Sulu's shoulders, pressing his lips to Sulu's temple. He keeps waiting for the next divide to open between them, but maybe that's not possible anymore. Sulu sighs, and Kirk can't decide if he should say something or just keep quiet. He wishes Sulu would look at him.  
  
"Sorry," Sulu says, muttering into the pillow.  
  
"For what?" Kirk says, and maybe it's a cruel question.  
  
"I don't know," Sulu says, and he worms closer, hiding his face against Kirk's shoulder. Kirk runs his thumb over the tiny hairs on Sulu's ear until he softens into sleep, and he keeps his eyes on the closet door, but Chekov's ghost never shows.  
  
In the morning, Sulu wakes him up with sex, hot kisses and a tight hand around his cock, his other hand pushing Kirk's shirt up. Kirk moans and helps Sulu undress him, going loose-limbed when Sulu climbs on top. He's afraid it will feel like some bizarre severing ritual, having sex while Chekov's box sits across the room, in the closet, but it's not like that at all, maybe because it's become the best sort of routine, waking up together and fumbling for the lube. Sulu seems to need him badly, completely in control and then suddenly changing course, guiding Kirk into him with a moan, his head falling back as he sinks into the feeling.  
  
"That's good, Lieutenant," Kirk says as Sulu begins to ride him, heavy-lidded and sluggish, tugging on himself while Kirk folds his hands behind his head. "Fuck yourself on that dick," Kirk says, his voice low and gravelly from sleep. He wants to touch Sulu but won't let himself, not yet. He likes it when Sulu whines a little first, begging. When he does, chewing his lip and pinching his eyes shut, Kirk sits up with a groan and grabs Sulu's hips, pushing him down onto his back. There's no more talking after that, just Kirk grunting and Sulu moaning as he's fucked, holding his legs apart while Kirk pounds him.  
  
"Jim," Sulu cries when he comes, and Kirk bites at Sulu's panting mouth, wanting to taste that name on his lips. Sulu almost never says it unless they're fucking, and Kirk wonders if it's because Chekov only wanted to be called _baby_ under certain circumstances. The thought snags in Jim's mind now, and he growls against Sulu's neck, wanting to push it away. When he's inside Sulu he has to pretend that Chekov never existed, or he'll get stuck on imagining what it was like between them: better, softer, more sacred.  
  
"Pull out when you come," Sulu says, his voice dark and dangerous in Kirk's ear. "I want to watch you – on my stomach, my chest –"  
  
"Fuck," Kirk says, yanking his cock from Sulu's grasping heat, because that request is enough to send him over the edge. He watches Sulu's face as he pumps his come all over him, both of them moaning low, sounding astonished. Sulu's eyes are trained on Kirk's spurting slit, his tongue slipping out to wet his bottom lip, and Kirk stumbles forward with a groan, his cockhead hovering in front of Sulu's open lips as Sulu laps at the air, trying to catch the last drops on his tongue.  
  
"Damn, Hikaru," Kirk pants out, stroking his fingers through Sulu's hair as he licks very delicately along Kirk's slit, like he's not sure he wants to be this dirty but can't help himself. "Fucking – shit."  
  
Sulu laughs and grins up at him, wiping his chin. Kirk drops down to kiss him, moaning at the taste of Sulu's morning breath combined with his own bitter spunk. Fuck the gym. He loves Sulu when he's like this, all tangled in the blankets and dirtied up before his shift, waking up hungry for Kirk's come.  
  
"So," Sulu says, panting up at the ceiling while Kirk flops down to chew on his ear. "Today – the Plint galaxy, right? Should be able to get us there in a couple of hours, I'll just have to check the warp path – what?"  
  
"Nothing," Kirk says, grinning. "It's just cute when you try to talk about work right after asking me to come all over you."  
  
"Fucking, fine – what do you want me to do?" Sulu asks. He flushes and tackles Kirk, who laughs. "What do you want, a thank you, an evaluation? 'God, Captain, you sure did unload on me! Damn, man, that really hit the spot!'"  
  
"No, no, I seriously love it when you do that," Kirk says when Sulu has him pinned, holding his wrists to the mattress. "It's the cutest fucking thing, I mean it."  
  
"Fuck you," Sulu mutters, but he leans down to kiss Kirk hard, his cheeks still hot with embarrassment.  
  
After his shift on the bridge, Kirk goes to one of the conference rooms to finish up some administrative work. He types up a message to the assignments manager about Chekov's old room being up for reassignment, and something makes him save it to his drafts rather than sending it. He's afraid that Sulu will come running up to him in a panic as soon as he's through the door of their quarters, telling Kirk he's changed his mind, he needs that room, needs all of it back, Chekov's old uniforms and those dirty sheets. Even thinking of the captain's quarters as _theirs_ feels strange and unnatural, though it would be far more strange and unnatural not to have Sulu living with him there. He's feeling itchy by the time he gets to the door of his quarters, envisioning Sulu inside, weeping over that box and regretting everything. He opens the door and finds Sulu on the sofa typing on his PADD, his hair wet from a shower.  
  
"Hey," Sulu says, not looking up. "You hungry?"  
  
"Yeah," Kirk says. He's got to stop feeling stunned by every hint of normalcy between them. This is his life, and it's not going anywhere. This is the family he actually gets to keep.  
  
"I'm just writing to my sister," Sulu says. "I'll be done in a minute. Want to go to the mess?"  
  
"Sure," Kirk says, and he should head for the shower, but he stretches out on the sofa with Sulu instead, putting his chin on Sulu's shoulder and reading his letter to his sister as he types it.  
  
 _Watch her have twins or something, too_ , Sulu types, referring to his oldest sister, Hanna, who is pregnant again. He's writing to his youngest sister, Meiko, who he's closest with. They've both resolved never to have children; the older sisters already have five between them. It's still considered somewhat bizarre to have more than one or two children, and Sulu was teased as a kid for being one of four, accused of having parents who were trying to start their own cult or form their own softball team.  
  
"Alright," Sulu says as he sends the message. He yawns, resting his cheek against the top of Kirk's head. "You ready to go?"  
  
"Yeah," Kirk says. "Just a sec, though, let me change my shirt." He normally goes to the mess in the uniform he wore on shift, but he needs an excuse to slip into the bedroom for a moment. He shuts the door, pulls out his PADD, and opens the message about Chekov's room.  
  
After he's sent it, he looks to the closet, and there's still no green-eyed ghost giving him a brokenhearted look, but he gets goosebumps anyway.  
  
*  
  
Weeks pass, and Kirk stops looking at the closet and expecting to see Chekov. He forgets about the box, and forgets what it was like to get fucked by anyone but Sulu, because he can't believe that being pulled apart could ever not feel good, that the inherent vulnerability could make him feel anything but safe. He skips his workouts and gains five pounds, doesn't care. He gets stomachaches from laughing too hard, in bed with Sulu at night or in the sick bay office with McCoy, games of cards devolving into reminiscing about their Academy days in a way that they couldn't have before they found this peace. The old stories about McCoy's post-divorce binges and Kirk's playboy bullshit feel like something they saw in a movie once.  
  
"So, when are you getting married?" McCoy asks one night as they're playing no-stakes poker, sucking down some whiskey before returning to their respective partners. Kirk scoffs.  
  
"Never," he says.  
  
"Too bad ass for that, huh? Both of you?"  
  
"Exactly. You should be able to love somebody without having a _contract_ , Bones."  
  
Bones snorts as if he knows that Kirk is only repeating something Sulu said.  
  
"It's not about that," Bones says. "It's about – you remember when we were on Xerxes-10, and we had to partake that ceremony with those virgin girls who danced around with silk scarves while a bunch of the locals played drums?"  
  
"Yeah," Kirk says. It was kind of disturbing, particularly because the Xerxian people are so child-like.  
  
"They know the goddamn spring is gonna come even if they don't make a bunch of girls dance around," Bones says. "But in the back of their minds, there's this primal kind of fear, because what if it didn't? What if they were the first generation to skip the ceremony and they fucked up the whole world? Plus, it's fun, it's a party, an excuse to get everybody together and dance around drunkenly. Have we ever encountered a culture that won't take every opportunity to do that?"  
  
"Uh, yeah. The Vulcans, to name one."  
  
"Oh, sure. And look what happened to them."  
  
"Bones, Jesus!"  
  
"Alright, I know – I'm not serious. But it distresses me to hear that you don't understand the point of marriage."  
  
"Yeah, 'cause you're such a champion of it. Wait, why are we even having this conversation? You're not going to propose to Chapel, are you?"  
  
"No," Bones says, glowering. "This is all hypothetical. It started out as a joke, I think."  
  
"Uh-huh. And devolved into you making light of xenocide. Nice, Bones."  
  
Kirk is back in his quarters an hour later, drinking a beer and listening to Sulu complain about some botany lab newbie who has been messing with his seed samples. They eat _shabu-shabu_ , which is Sulu's favorite meal and always on the menu at least once a week. Kirk likes it mostly for the challenge of trying to hold slippery things with chopsticks while getting progressively drunker. The tofu is his favorite, because it always breaks apart immediately, only to emerge later as a special surprise that bubbles up out of the depths of the pot.  
  
They don't have sex that night, just crawl into the bed after a few hours of trying to pick up and decipher the local channels, getting nothing more than what looks like a couple of octopi hosting a show about a sport that's unfamiliar to both of them, something involving yellow balls and hover bikes. In bed, they're both tired but talkative, Sulu laughing when Kirk tells him about his conversation with Bones and Kirk promising to reprimand that botany lab newbie if he touches Sulu's seeds again. Sulu rolls over to signal that he's ready for sleep, and Kirk wraps around him, pulling Sulu's back against his chest.  
  
He feels like now would be a good time to say _Love you_ , casual and drowsy, grinning against the back of Sulu's neck, but he stops himself. It's something he'll regret.  
  
The day that follows is as normal as any they've spent in space, breakfast in the captain's quarters and a routine shift on the bridge, Kirk too preoccupied with distractions to notice most of Sulu's flying, though when he does look up he's proud, watching Sulu's hands move over the conn, noting the cautious moments, the seconds when Sulu makes his decisions. Sulu goes off shift first, and Kirk takes care to catch his eye as he's heading toward the lift, giving him a smirk that promises things, not yet sure if it's a hard fuck or an offering of his own ass. It doesn't matter; they'll fool around, fill each other in on the hours they've been apart while they eat dinner, stare at the data screen, fall into the bed. Kirk has begun to understand so many things since he's settled into the comfort of Sulu's undeclared love: the way his mother crumbled without it, and the way his brother guarded himself against it to the point of destroying himself entirely. He's become the sort of fool who exults in this understanding, believing that he's somehow immune to the downsides. It's like knowing that he has a soul, which isn't like _knowing_ anything at all.  
  
After Sulu has left the bridge, Kirk spends an hour or so listening to Spock's advanced briefing on the Grotliun galaxy, which they'll be entering soon. He's thinking about the danger and the complications, and also about the shower in his quarters, Sulu with his slick post-fencing skin, his adrenaline-fueled groping, and he allows himself to imagine Spock looking forward to Uhura's attentions, too, because she went off shift around the same time that Sulu did. He's working on a half-assed philosophy about his crew being more productive on the bridge when they're getting their rocks off not just with whoever's willing but with someone they really love, wondering if he could actually suggest a study about this, when the comm comes from Scotty, on his personal line.  
  
"Captain."  
  
There's something in Scotty's voice that Kirk recognizes, but he can't to put his finger on what it is, though he knows by instinct that it's not anything good.  
  
The sense of deja-vu makes him turn away from the conn, and he doesn't want to think about why.  
  
"Yeah, Scotty?"  
  
"Y'ud better get down here, sir. There's, ah. A development."  
  
Kirk glances at Spock, who's watching him. The rest of the bridge is quiet, no one paying attention to the captain's personal comm, everyone doing their jobs. It's something about Spock's attention that makes Kirk's heart pound, and he thinks about Sulu's current location, how there's almost no way he could be in danger.  
  
"I've got to run down to the transport room," Kirk says to Spock, pushing away the itchy feeling of familiarity. "You've got the bridge until I'm back."  
  
"Yes, sir."  
  
Kirk hurries for the lift, his heart beating too fast as he makes himself think about Sulu in the gym, doing his fencing exercises, breathing hard while he snaps his sword into the empty air. He's fine. Whatever else might be happening can be dealt with. Kirk's life has boiled down to this, and it's a comfort as he walks quickly through the halls, toward the transport room. He knows where Sulu is, and other things matter, too, but not as much.  
  
He doesn't brace himself for anything serious, which is a mistake. Later, he'll feel like this would have made a difference. He sees Jimenez first, but the sight of him doesn't register as anything real, not until he sees Harrison. By the time he allows his eyes to settle on Chekov he doesn't really know where he is, but that doesn't seem to matter, because wherever this is, it can't be a real place with any consequences. People are staring at him, chiefly Scotty and his assistant, and then there are the ghosts, who are looking at each other like they expected more.  
  
"What," Kirk says, and Scotty takes his arm, maybe to keep him from dropping to his knees, though Kirk doesn't feel faint, only resistant, determined to blink and blink until this is as unreal as it should be.  
  
"They just showed up, Captain," Scotty says, for the second or maybe third time, and Kirk hears it like an echo, the cave walls closing around him. "They don't seem to know that they've – been gone. They were confused by our reaction. I've called the doctor."  
  
Bones, good. Kirk won't let himself look at Chekov, because he's afraid there's a cinematic representation of what's happened in the past two years playing in his eyes, and that Chekov will want to hold him steady and watch closely. But no, that's ridiculous, because Chekov is dead. He takes an unsteady step backward and Scotty catches him.  
  
"I just need," Kirk says, not sure how to finish. He needs Bones to come and clarify the fact that this is a hallucination. He needs Jimenez and Harrison and especially Chekov to stop looking at him like they want to hear him say something comforting.  
  
"Of course, Captain," Scotty says, speaking to him softly, almost condescending enough to snap Kirk into action. He would probably need to be fired on to get to that point, and kind of wishes that someone here would try it, preferably that Chekov impostor who looks so damn convincing, his eyebrows arching with confusion.  
  
"We all needed a moment," Scotty says, maybe talking about himself and his assistant, maybe referring to the ghosts as well. He's keeping his voice low, speaking only to Kirk. "Our readings indicate that these men have clearance to board the _Enterprise_. I think the ion storm sent them into the future, sir, to this moment in time. Their coordinates weren't scrambled in the way that we feared. It was simply the timestamp for their return that was compromised by the storm."  
  
Scotty waits to hear what Kirk will say about this. Kirk is staring at Chekov now, the reality of the moment sinking in like poison that he swallowed in gulps. He thinks of his brother, and knowing as soon as he came through the door of his room that Sam was dead, not needing to take his pulse. There are some things that hit bone before anything else, the mind and the heart and any scientific reasoning catching up later.  
  
"I, ah," Kirk says, flicking into autopilot. "Bones is – oh, Bones."  
  
Like always, Bones knows when Kirk needs him and appears just before it's too late. They look at each other, and Kirk knows by the expression on Bones' face that he's seen Chekov, and that Chekov is a real thing, actually standing in the room. It occurs to Kirk that he should be relieved, and he wants to strike himself on the chest until he is. He smiles at Scotty, who looks only vaguely horrified in response.  
  
"Gentlemen," Kirk says, turning toward the three ghosts who are waiting to hear him speak, all of them apparently unharmed, only confused. "Welcome back."  
  
"Captain, was there some issue?" Jimenez asks. He's the senior officer among the away mission crew that Kirk sent off-ship two years ago, and Kirk thinks of Jimenez's wife, the way she held her fist over her mouth when Kirk told her that her husband was dead. "Mr. Scott – seemed to suggest –"  
  
"Let's not trouble ourselves with that yet," Bones says, shooting Kirk and Scotty a look. "Potentially delicate situation and such – just relax, boys. There was an ion storm and we have to check you for injuries, that's all."  
  
Kirk can't stop looking at Chekov, who keeps sneaking looks at Kirk as if to ask what he did wrong. Kirk remembers him looking completely different, an angelic force of nature who glowed with innocence. This Chekov is scrawny and a little greasy-looking, his curls plastered to his head and his cheeks smudged with dirt. He keeps touching his hips like a kid who's forgotten his speech, like he's looking for the note cards he shoved into his pocket in case of emergency.  
  
"Get them all to sick bay," Bones says to Chapel when she appears, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. "I need to know, without a doubt, that these are the same men who left the ship two years ago." He says this part quietly, then takes Kirk's elbow.  
  
"You okay?" he asks, his voice low and his lips close to Kirk's ear, as if they're sharing some military secret. Kirk scoffs.  
  
"Yeah," he says, his chest so tight that he can't breathe. But it's not like this is _really happening_. He forces himself to calm down. Walking out of the transport room helps.  
  
Shortly afterward, Bones leads the three crewmen out, heading toward sick bay. Kirk only looks at Chekov out of the corner of his eye, holding his breath like he's going past a graveyard – was it Sulu who said that once, that people held their breath when they went past? Bones gives Kirk a look, and Kirk nods as if he's granting him permission to treat these ghosts as patients. He needs to drink some coffee or wake from this dream or get punched in the face. He leans against the wall in the hallway for a long time, listening to Scotty speak to his assistant transport operator, that girl, what's her name? Miranda something. Kirk is bad about that, remembering only first names.  
  
"So simple, can't believe we didn't consider it," Scotty is saying. "Almost too simple, eh?"  
  
"Two years," Miranda says. "And it was less than a second for them – poor things. But their families will be so relieved. It's a miracle, really."  
  
"Yeah," Scotty says. "Except for. Well."  
  
"Yeah," Miranda says, and Kirk knows they're talking about him. He pushes off the wall and walks away, not sure where he's headed. Sulu will be there in his quarters, in the shower or dressed in his civvies, stretched out on the sofa. Kirk can't be near him after seeing what he just saw, so he keeps walking, through three decks, up and down the stairs, avoiding the lifts. His PADD beeps and he knows it's a message from Bones.  
  
 _It's them_ , Bones sends. _I'd bet my life_.  
  
 _Good_ , Kirk sends back, close to breaking the surface of his shock. These are his crewmen, alive after all. He's glad, he is, glad to take this bullet. He'll just be maimed, not killed, and it's what he signed up for. Even before he became a captain, there's always been something about who he is that serves as a kind of an agreement to bear things like this. It's a relief to be disappointed by it again, and to know that he's not allowed to be. Familiar territory: fine, fine, _fine_.  
  
 _Jim_ , Bones sends, nothing more. Kirk approximates a laugh, alone in some stairwell. He's not sure which deck this is.  
  
 _I'm going to tell him_ , Kirk sends. _But only if you're one hundred percent sure_.  
  
There's a pause. Kirk wants to hear that Bones is hesitating, that the Chekov who reappeared is still possibly a horrible alien hybrid sent to take over the ship. Then again: fuck. He doesn't want to hear that, doesn't want to be responsible for the sick relief he would experience if that were true.  
  
 _It's them, Jim_ , Bones sends. _It's him_.  
  
Kirk walks, feeling like a ghost himself in the halls of his ship, passing crewmen who don't know what's happened. They smile at him, and he's not sure what sort of face he makes in return. He tries to force himself to snap out of it, remembering Sam's funeral, when he had to stop shaking long enough to hoist the coffin onto his shoulder with the help of five others, the older men bearing most of the weight, Frank's meaty hand like an insult beside Kirk's. He remembers loading the coffin into the hearse and noticing the sweaty print Frank's hand left behind on the gold handle. He'd thought of how Sam would have spit on his shoes for letting that happen.  
  
But it's not like anyone has died. No, the opposite has happened. Chekov is back on the ship, two decks up, alive and mildly confused, fidgeting on a bio bed while Bones takes his pulse. All that's left is to tell Sulu what's happened.  
  
It takes Kirk awhile to locate his quarters, the fever that's building between his temples making him too overheated to navigate. And even that _word_ is funny, or should be, in relation to his loss of direction: _navigate_ , ha, well. He stands in front of the door to his quarters for maybe ten minutes, swaying, reminding himself that this is good, a relief and a blessing, the thing he once wanted almost as badly as Sulu did. If he could recruit someone to slap him hard, it would probably help, but there's no one around. Surely the gossip is spreading already. He punches in his entry code before some asshole can message Sulu about what's happened.  
  
Without Kirk's consent, his legs bring him into the main sitting area, where Sulu is lounging on the sofa, wearing sweatpants and an old Academy shirt that might be one of Kirk's. It's a little big on him, the sleeves hanging from his shoulders.  
  
"Hey, there you are," Sulu says, tapping the data screen's controller against his knee, his heel bouncing on the floor. "Did you go see Bones or something?"  
  
Kirk wonders how long he was gone. Sulu still has a humid soap smell when Kirk sits down beside him, but his freshly washed hair has mostly dried. He seems worried, and he scoots closer, reaching over to squeeze Kirk's thigh.  
  
"What's wrong?" he asks. "Something happened. I knew it. I can tell."  
  
"I, uh." Kirk's voice is cobwebby with disuse, as if he's been wandering the ship for days, not hours.  
  
"What?" Sulu asks, his eyebrows arching with worry, making Kirk think of the way Chekov looked at him. Chekov – Chekov _looked at him_ , he's here, on the ship, meaningfully alive according to Bones. Kirk can't imagine how he could ever convey this information to Sulu, but he doesn't want someone else to tell him, either.  
  
"I – I have to tell you something, and you're not going to believe me." Kirk hasn't even begun to try to envision Sulu's reaction. He's pretty sure that Sulu will be angry with him, at least initially, but he can't put his finger on why, or think about what will happen after that.  
  
"What?" Sulu says, his hand sliding from Kirk's leg like he knows he's about to be betrayed. "Did something – is Bones okay? Uhura? Oh – shit – was there a message from my – is it one of my sisters?"  
  
"No, no." Kirk takes Sulu's hand, wondering if it's the last time he'll be allowed to touch it. Sulu will leave Kirk for Chekov; it's not even a question. This is the beginning of their goodbye. Sulu just don't know it yet.  
  
"Everyone's fine," Kirk says. "Everyone."  
  
"Well, what the –"  
  
"Hikaru, you were right." Kirk just has to say it. Or maybe he should interview Chekov personally first. They didn't even speak in the transport room, under Bones' instructions to keep the recently time-traveled crewmen in the dark. What will happen when they learn that they've lost two years? Aneurysms?  
  
"Right about what?" Sulu is frowning now, watching the color drain from Kirk's face.  
  
"We had – an unauthorized transport just an hour or two ago. Maybe longer, I – and the men who transported appeared to be – those men we lost two years ago. Pavel, Jimenez, and Harrison. Pavel, Hikaru. He transported back to the ship."  
  
He waits before unloading the rest. Sulu makes a little noise of disbelief in the back of his throat, but he hasn't gotten as far as not believing that this has happened, still stuck on not believing that it's true. He's frowning more deeply now, like he's trying to work out why Kirk would lie about this.  
  
"The ion storm created a time glitch," Kirk says. "They transported two years into the future. Impossible to anticipate, but it makes sense in hindsight. To them, no time has passed since we expected them back that day. To them, it felt like a normal warp. Bones has checked them out. They're healthy, they're authentic. They're okay, Hikaru. Pavel is okay, he's alive."  
  
Sulu is quiet for awhile, though he makes a couple of noises like he's trying to speak, maybe attempts to accuse Kirk of lying or being high or having lost his mind. Kirk just waits it out, his hands on his knees.  
  
"That can't be true," Sulu says.  
  
"I know," Kirk says. "But it is."  
  
Sulu stands and looks around the room like he's not sure where he is or how he got here. He runs his hands through his hair, his mouth hanging open, pants out a few shaky breaths. He doesn't come anywhere close to meeting Kirk's eyes.  
  
"Can I see him?" Sulu asks, his voice breaking, and Kirk nods.  
  
"Sick bay," he says, because it's not like they can walk there together in horrible silence. Still, after Sulu bolts, Kirk gets up and follows, making sure there's enough space between them that they'll end up on separate lifts.  
  
Kirk doesn't register most of his walk to sick bay. It's like he's traded places with Chekov's ghost and has become an irrelevant wraith in the halls of his own starship. He tells himself to get over it, that things happen, that he's got a job to do. So far he's mostly just dreading the way it will play out: Sulu's polite explanations, his expectation that Kirk will understand, and the fact that he'll have to. He's glad Chekov is alive, and Jimenez, and Harrison. He just doesn't know what to do with the rest of his half-formed thoughts, the screaming panic that won't do him any good but won't go away.  
  
He arrives at sick bay just as Sulu is dropping to his knees before the bio bed where Chekov sits, looking horribly confused and more than a little frightened. Jimenez and Harrison are both speaking with counselors, both of them sounding angry. Chekov is rubbing his palms together nervously, then sliding off the bio bed to walk toward Sulu, whose breath is coming in dry gasps, his back jerking as he stares at Chekov. Kirk can't see his face.  
  
"Pavel, you," Sulu says, raspy and pained as Chekov kneels down before him, placing his hands on Sulu's face.  
  
"Hikaru, he told me," Chekov says. He shakes his head. "The doctor, he said – oh!"  
  
Sulu hugs Chekov hard, making a sound like he just stepped on a nail but doesn't want anyone to know. Chapel, standing by the bed Chekov had been sitting on, puts her hand over her mouth. It would be a touching moment, Sulu rocking Chekov in his arms, trying to hide his sobs against Chekov's shoulder as Chekov whispers Russian things in his ear, but then Chapel looks at Kirk as if to ask him what he's going to do, and everyone's going to look at him like that from now on. As if he could even begin to know. Bones appears at Chapel's side, looking at Kirk like he's the only one in the room who knows what just happened, and, in the most important ways, he is.  
  
Kirk leaves, thinking about the day after he made his second attempt at sex with one of Sam's friends, one of those stolid afternoons when a thunderstorm threatened and brought nothing but thirty seconds of weak rainfall before heading off again. It was the worst insult, and a phenomenon that Kirk never failed to notice after that, the way the weather would offer to match his mood and then just shower him with sunlight that felt like laughter in his face.  
  
*  
  
He sits in his quarters and stares at the aquarium, feeling as if the fish know what's going on, like they're making significant eye contact with him at moments. He'll start drinking soon, but he's not capable of anything that complicated yet, and he's got a shift in eight hours, so it's not like he can get truly shit-faced, not like he can take leave time for this. He'll give Sulu a few days, and Chekov, of course. They'll lie in bed together and whisper to each other like reincarnated spirits who have found each other in a new life, telling every story, recasting the spells that will keep them from ever losing each other for long. Kirk is happy for them, actually, he just wants to strip his Sulu from the one that belongs to Chekov and be on his way, hoarding the parts that now belong to him.  
  
Only none of Sulu ever really did. That was clear enough in sick bay. Sulu pitied Kirk his longing, and it wasn't like he had anything better to do than try to fulfill it. He was a shell; Kirk can see that now. All of his reactions were kindnesses intended to prop Kirk up. Sulu and Chekov are good in a way that can't be learned or transferred. They deserve each other and they know it. The universe has course corrected. The joke's on Kirk. It's a good one, the best kind, leaving him with nothing, not even the right to complain.  
  
When someone flings the door open he expects it to be Bones, and he jumps up from the sofa when he sees that it's Sulu. Their eyes meet, and for a moment Kirk feels cheered, because this Sulu looks like the one who sleeps in his bed, not the one who fell to his knees in sick bay.  
  
"I need a bag or something," Sulu says. He's breathing fast, as if he's been running. He goes into the bedroom and heads for the closet, grabbing the duffel he takes to the gym and shoving things into it: socks, underwear, t-shirts. Kirk stands in the doorway and watches.  
  
"Help me!" Sulu says, looking up at him, furious and then just pleading. "I have to get all my stuff out of here, I have to get my old room back, you have to kick out the guy you gave it to, put him somewhere else. He's an ensign, right, the guy you gave my room to?"  
  
"Hikaru," Kirk says. He likes the sound of the name on his lips; it calms him down. Now that Sulu is here with Kirk while Chekov is elsewhere the situation seems less impossible.  
  
"There's no time!" Sulu says, shoving Kirk out of the way. He goes into the bathroom and grabs his toothbrush, cursing when he fumbles it. It clatters onto the ground and Sulu bends down to retrieve it, then crawls over to the toilet and throws up. Kirk kneels down behind him, jabbed by the memory of Sulu when he was coming down from his binge, when he shut himself into the bathroom to get sick alone. Kirk rubs his back, then gets him some water and a damp washcloth. Sulu flushes the toilet and slams the lid shut, panting his breath as he leans against the sink cabinet. Kirk sits beside him and mops at his forehead with the washcloth. He wipes Sulu's mouth clean, then the corners of his eyes.  
  
"It's not real," Sulu says, staring straight ahead, through the open bathroom door at the unmade bed where he slept last night with Kirk. That was an alternate dimension. Kirk now knows how it feels to be thrust into one without warning. Sulu now knows the feeling of being pulled back. It doesn't look like it's any easier to comprehend in the initial stages.  
  
"It's real," Kirk says. "And it's okay. We'll get your old room back if that's what you want. Chekov doesn't have to know anything. It would be cruel to – thrust that on him. And you don't have to make any decisions right now. Just – we'll get your stuff packed up and you can go be with him for awhile. He's lost two years worth of time, and you're going to have to help him deal with it. He's probably sitting back there in sick bay thinking that this isn't real, too."  
  
Kirk feels better already. He'll just be their captain for awhile, it's fine. Then Sulu leans over to drop into Kirk's lap, resting his head on Kirk's thigh, and Kirk thinks seriously about what it will be like to help him carry his plants to another room.  
  
"I just need two minutes," Sulu says. "I can't think. I need two minutes."  
  
"Okay, Lieutenant, two minutes granted." Kirk cups his palm over Sulu's ear, lets him hide. He counts the seconds, and after one hundred and twenty of them have passed, Sulu is still slumped in his lap. Kirk's not sure if he should nudge him or hold him or make him talk about this. He puts his head back against the sink cabinet and wonders what he'll do instead of sleeping while Sulu is gone.  
  
A few more minutes pass, and Sulu drags himself up, walking back into the bedroom without looking back at Kirk, who picks up Sulu's toothbrush and cleans it in the sink. It would be wrong to expect Chekov to understand, and Sulu is just trying to make this easier on him. Kirk keeps this in mind as he gathers Sulu's shampoo and razor, the chewable orange vitamins that he's eaten every morning since he was a kid, his favorite towel. It's one he brought from home, organically made and much fluffier than anything Starfleet provides, a dark cranberry color that brings to mind bachelorhood. Kirk rubs it against his face before walking out into the bedroom, his arms loaded with Sulu's things. He tries to come up with a way that Sulu could ever come back to him, but it would have to involve losing Chekov again, and he doesn't want that. He hands Sulu his toiletries, trying to meet his eyes, but Sulu ducks his gaze.  
  
"Thanks," Sulu says. He looks pale and tired. Kirk knows the full force of his relief hasn't even hit yet. It must have been hard to wrench himself from Chekov so he could come here and hide the evidence.  
  
"You're gonna be okay," Kirk says, running his fingers through Sulu's hair as he kneels on the closet floor, packing the rest of his clothes into one of Kirk's away mission bags.  
  
"I know," Sulu says. He seems irritated, so Kirk gives him some space. He does a sweep of the bedroom to check for anything Sulu forgot. There's a crumpled t-shirt in the corner, one that Kirk tore off of him a few nights ago, when Sulu got back from fencing practice. Kirk leaves it there.  
  
They manage to carry it all in one trip, Sulu with the Chekov box and another box containing his plants, one under each arm, his duffel strapped across his chest. Kirk carries two additional bags, and raps hard on Ensign York's door when they arrive. Sulu is sweating, holding both boxes so tightly against his sides that the cardboard gives a little.  
  
“Captain,” York says when he opens the door, looking bedraggled; he's not on shift for another five hours.  
  
“Ensign York, I need you to clear out,” Kirk says, never happier to put on the mask of captaincy, his shoulders square and his eyes set.  
  
“Clear – out, sir?”  
  
“Yes. We need this room. I'm sorry, Ensign, but the situation can neither be explained or delayed. We'll give you five minutes of privacy to get your things together and activate the sweep-clean.”  
  
York says nothing for a minute, his mouth hanging open. Kirk can see the thought process that's burning behind his eyes as he remembers the night when Kirk swept Ensign Oliva away from him. York's eyes harden as he seems to decide that the captain has a personal grudge against him, and Kirk feels badly, but there's nothing he can do. Sulu needs this, and it's something Kirk can actually give him. He makes elaborate speeches about the mental health of shell-shocked Ensign Chekov in his head, but this is really about Sulu, and about what Kirk can still do for him.  
  
They stand with their backs to the wall in the hallway, Sulu's things on the floor around their feet. The door to Ensign York's room is sound-proofed, but Kirk can pretty clearly imagine the sorts of curses that are hissing between his teeth as he stuffs his things into bags and boxes and prepares to have to share a room again. Kirk will have to promote him or something, maybe bring him on an away mission to a known pleasure planet.  
  
“Where's Chekov?” Kirk asks. For so long it was an irrelevant question: Chekov was nowhere and everywhere, dematerialized.  
  
“He's on a video call with his parents,” Sulu says. He closes his eyes. “Fuck. He's gonna lose his shit when he finds out that they split up.”  
  
“Maybe they won't tell him,” Kirk says.  
  
“They will. They're not – they're all about _honesty_. Shit. Like that's what he needs right now.”  
  
“Right,” Kirk says. “So. Obviously –”  
  
“Obviously he's never going to know about us,” Sulu says sharply, glaring at the opposite wall. Kirk tells himself that Sulu won't look him in the eye because he might break down if he did, but he seems pretty calm in his resolve.  
  
“Never,” Kirk says. “Right.” Kirk wishes he could tell Ensign York that he knows how it feels, being told to clear out of your life with no warning or apology.  
  
“Jim. It's not – ”  
  
“No, I know, it's okay.”  
  
Sulu actually turns to look at him then, but York shoves the door to his quarters open and comes out, still puffy-faced with sleep, trying not to look mutinous as he clutches his things, crumpled clothes shoved into any bag or box he could find.  
  
“Clean-sweep is running, sir,” he says, doing a better job of keeping the malice out of his voice than Kirk would have.  
  
“Here, Ensign, let me help you with that,” Kirk says, and just like that, he's got York's things in his arms, Sulu's things surrendered.  
  
“I guess you can take it from here, Lieutenant?” Kirk says, staring at Sulu, who's softening now, looking like he doesn't want to be left alone. Sulu nods.  
  
“Thanks, sir,” he says.  
  
“I'll have a kit sent down for you,” Kirk says. “Bedsheets, you know, utensils, a water cooler – do you need any, ah, do you have any special requests –”  
  
“No, sir, thank you.” And now Sulu looks like he wants Kirk to leave, so he does, Ensign York trailing behind him.  
  
“We'll find you a good roommate, I promise,” Kirk says as they walk through the halls. It's nice, being distracted by someone else's misery, and he knows there's enough of that in the universe to keep him busy for the rest of his life.  
  
“Hey, how 'bout Oliva?” Kirk says, grinning, but York doesn't seem to like the joke.  
  
“I'll stay wherever you want me to, sir,” he says.  
  
“I know you think this is shitty, Ensign,” Kirk says. “I'll make it up to you.”  
  
“Fine, sir.”  
  
Kirk knows that York thinks Kirk just got dumped by Sulu and is taking it out on him. He probably doesn't know about the recovered crewmen yet; he was asleep. Kirk considers taking York for a beer and confiding in him, then longs for Bones so powerfully that he half-expects him to appear around the next corner.  
  
He helps York set up in a room with a nice kid named Ichbar, a half-Ryslian, half-human who is beloved by most of his fellow Ensigns. Kirk is heartened by the thought of the ranting York will do when he's gone, and how Ichbar will both comfort York and stick up for his captain. Hopefully.  
  
“Thanks for your cooperation, guys,” Kirk says as he's leaving, and Ichbar smiles. York salutes, probably sarcastically, but Kirk can forgive that.  
  
He goes to sick bay, dizzy with visions of Sulu frantically setting up his old room, getting everything back in place, deleting any trace of Kirk from his PADD. Their old conversations, the newer ones full of code words and inside jokes, that picture of him with the pirate hat. It's okay. It's for Chekov, and Chekov didn't do anything wrong.  
  
There's muttering coming from Bones' office, and normally Kirk would turn heel if he heard Bones using that low tone with Chapel, but today he just stands outside and waits for them to finish. He looks at the bio bed that Chekov was sitting on earlier, the sterile sheets still dented from where his little backside rested. Kirk is glad that he's alive, and that Jimenez and Harrison are safe, too, crying on video calls of their own as they reconnect with their families. He's glad that this happened, and the rest will follow, the figuring out how to live with it.  
  
“It's not like that,” Bones is saying to Chapel. “It's not a thing that will get worked out. He'll get all self-sacrificing and noble and pretend like none of it ever happened. Just watch.”  
  
“What about Sulu?” Chapel says. “He's – ”  
  
“He'll do the same thing,” Bones says. “But. It'll be different for him. Not easier, though Jim will think so.”  
  
Kirk scoffs silently, though he was thinking that. He walks back toward the front sick bay door and makes a production of opening it, stomping inside and calling for Bones.  
  
“In here, Jim,” Bones says. He comes to the door of his office and frowns out at Kirk as if to tell him that doesn't approve of any of this nonsense. Kirk actually laughs, and Chapel pops up from behind Bones, looking horrified.  
  
“Well, it's a miracle,” Kirk says, disturbed by the fact that he's completely sober but still managing to sound unhinged. Bones gives Chapel a look and she nods, heading for the front door. She touches Kirk's arm on her way past, not even seeming to notice.  
  
“Jim,” Bones says when she's gone. “Come in. Have a drink.”  
  
“Can't drink, Bones, too much to do,” Kirk says, scratching at his hair. “I've got to meet with those three guys after they're resettled, fill them in on the developments we've made in two whole fucking years, then I've got to work them back into the shift rotation –”  
  
“Jim.”  
  
“And I want to speak to all of their families personally and individually on video calls, to apologize for what we've needlessly put them through. Even if there really was no way for us to anticipate this, I think it would be a nice gesture, you know? And of course there's all the official reporting, Jesus, the conference calls with the higher-ups, and the sciences will be going nuts, trying to figure out why this happened, wanting me to sit in on every fucking data control meeting, and I don't even want to think about all the bureaucratic bullshit involved in declaring a dead person alive again – we'll have to get all their on-ship privileges reactivated, Chekov's got a place to stay but we'll have to rearrange crew quarters to get Jimenez and Harrison their rooms back –”  
  
“Dammit, Jim! Are you almost through?”  
  
“Almost. I, uh. Actually, yeah, I think I'm done. And maybe I should have a whiskey. Just one.”  
  
“Maybe? Get in here, goddammit.”  
  
They sit in silence for awhile, Bones with his elbows on his desk and Jim slumped in the chair across from it, both of them drinking. Kirk listens to the quiet hum of sick bay and waits for Bones to figure out what to say.  
  
“Chekov deserves an adjustment period,” Bones says. “Hell, there might even be physical repercussions if we throw too much at him too fast. But, Jim. It was a somewhat eventful two years.”  
  
“You're discounting the fact that during that readjustment period, Sulu will readjust, too,” Kirk says. “You know that, right?”  
  
“No. I don't know that, and neither do you.”  
  
“Oh, bullshit, Bones. I'm not going to sit here and weep and act like he never gave a shit about me. Sure, he did, but I'm not fucking _Chekov_. That was a whole other – thing.”  
  
“Yeah? How so?”  
  
Kirk rolls his eyes and drums his fingers on the arm of the chair. He looks at the picture of Joanna on Bones' desk, updated since the last time Kirk noticed it. She's a teenager now, pretty and freckled. She still doesn't know about Chapel. Bones just doesn't see the point, given their separate locations. He says he'll introduce the two of them if he and Chapel make it through the five-year mission without hating each other. Kirk is starting to think that there's a pretty good chance of that happening.  
  
“Well, we should look at the coming weeks as a kind of intermission,” Bones says. “I wouldn't even put those three back on shift for at least a week.”  
  
“Wasn't planning on it. They've got a lot to catch up on. Hey, you know what'd be fun? If I taught a sort of class on the past two years, and they took notes, and I gave them a test at the end.”  
  
“Fine,” Bones says, rubbing his face. “I guess you're going to leave off the part about you and Sulu.”  
  
“Why the fuck would I tell –”  
  
“He's going to find out eventually, Jim. People talk. You can't issue an order that forbids your crew from talking about your love life.”  
  
“Can't I? Why not?”  
  
“Jim, for Christ's sake. He'll find out anyway. He'll realize something is different. Sulu will tell him.”  
  
“Bullshit he will.” Jim scoffs. “He already said he never would, and looked like he'd bite my hand off if I disagreed.”  
  
“He just found out Chekov is alive, what, six hours ago? I don't think his immediate reaction is the one you should go by.”  
  
“No, you don't know him like I do. He's stubborn. He's mad at me for putting him in this situation. He'll cling to that. He throws punches when he feels cornered.”  
  
“I think you should wait a few days and then talk to him,” Bones says. “Let him cry on your shoulder. It's not going to be easy for him, either.”  
  
Kirk shakes his head at the idea that Sulu would come crying to him about the hardships of cuddling Chekov into his arms again. He's going to spend the next two days remembering what he lost. He won't let Chekov out of his sight long enough to have a private conversation with Kirk unless Kirk orders him to, and Kirk would never stoop to that. He's got his fucking pride. He knows when to step away from a thing like this. He tries to imagine what his mother would have been like if she'd gotten Sam back: crazier than she'd been after losing him, having known what that was like, but healed in a way that even crazy people can be.  
  
“Let me give you something to help you sleep,” Bones says. “Please, Jim.”  
  
“Nah, I'm not going back to my quarters. I'll just take a shift. I've got a lot to do, but I can sit on the bridge while I do it. It's a routine flight path for the next five hours.”  
  
“Jim, wait,” Bones says, standing when Kirk reaches the doorway.  
  
“What, Bones? What do you want me to say?”  
  
“Nothing – I.” Bones stands there looking like he did when the _Enterprise_ was going to take off without Kirk, like he's going to figure out a way to drag him along, to not leave him alone.  
  
“Not this time, Bones,” Kirk says, and he goes.


	8. Chapter 8

The week that follows is packed with work. Kirk sleeps only intermittently, usually on the sofa, too tired to even bury his face in the t-shirt Sulu left behind. He has daily briefings with Jimenez, Harrison, and Chekov, who all seem to be doing well. Chekov shows no signs of detecting some horrifying difference in the Sulu he's returned to. He takes furious notes as Kirk goes over the events of the past two years, and Kirk notices that the end of his stylus is chewed on, and that it's not the same one Sulu saved. Almost every day, after their briefing, Chekov assaults Kirk with furious theorizing on why this might have happened, and Kirk tries to listen, tries not to think about what Chekov doesn't know, that Kirk has seen the tiny mole on the inside of Sulu's left thigh, that he knows what Sulu's skin tastes like when he's fucked out and panting, and the way he sometimes whines in his sleep like a frightened little boy, the way it feels to pull him close and quiet him.  
  
“So I am thinking that the atmosphere of the planet we were beaming off of must have had something to do with the time discrepancy,” Chekov says to Kirk as they're walking through the hall together after Kirk's fifth time-displaced-persons briefing. Kirk always tries to dart away after the meetings, but Chekov never fails to catch up with him, usually already in mid-sentence, his hands waving around while he discusses his theories.  
  
“I have been studying this, the atmosphere, and have discovered some fascinating properties,” Chekov says. “The hydrogen levels behave very strangely, and if you recall Corin's theorem on interdimensional relativity –”  
  
“That's great, Pavel, you keep working on that,” Kirk says, patting his shoulder. It's still a comfort to touch Chekov, and he's noticed everybody doing it when Chekov is in the common areas, as if his solidity needs to be tested. “I've got to run, though,” Kirk says. “I've got a video call with the Prenitlian chancellor in an hour and I need to go over my notes.” Sulu would laugh if he heard Kirk say this; he knows Kirk always shoots from the hip with politicians.  
  
“Oh – yes, sir, of course, but, _Keptin_ , may I talk to you about something else for a moment?” Chekov asks, growing timid, his shoulders raising. “It will be brief, sir, I promise.”  
  
“Fine, Ensign, what is it?” Kirk asks, pretending to be bored. His heart is hammering. He's always trying to catch the scent of Sulu when Chekov is close, fighting the urge to push Chekov up against a wall and demand details about what goes on between them in that room.  
  
“I wanted to thank you, sir, for speaking to my parents,” Chekov says, straightening his shoulders as if he's prepared a little speech. “They appreciated it very much, and they said they felt happy that I was under the care of a respectable _keptin_ – ah, my father said – he met you?”  
  
“Oh, yeah.” Kirk shrugs. “Didn't Hikaru tell you about that?”  
  
“No,” Chekov says. “Well, not before I asked. He said, ah, that he was nervous about meeting my father and that you offered to go with him.”  
  
Offered? No, it was Sulu who asked. It's a dumb thing to lie about, and Kirk feels a sudden, overwhelming anger toward Sulu, which is followed by crippling tenderness, a need to forgive and huddle around him.  
  
“That's right,” Kirk says. “He was just – he had a lot of respect for your father, you know, after hearing all your stories about him, and Sulu can be kind of. Insecure.”  
  
“Yes,” Chekov says, brightening. “I told him he was crazy – of course my father loved him! They talked for hours, he said. It's so strange, sir, that these things happened – that this time has passed.”  
  
“I know, believe me. Well, listen – ”  
  
“Ah – one more thing, sir, please, could I ask you?”  
  
“Sure, alright, just. Make it quick, huh?”  
  
Chekov fidgets, his cheeks going faintly pink. There's no one in the world who wouldn't prefer him to Kirk. Even Death was charmed enough to let him start over.  
  
“I was wondering, sir,” Chekov says. “About Hikaru. We have talked, of course, he's told me things, but I was wondering about another opinion, because I think, ah. Sometimes he keeps things from me? Not in a cruel way, but because he doesn't want me to – be hurt, or think less of him. He still sees me as a very young person, and it does not help that now he is six years older than me instead of four.”  
  
Kirk hadn't thought about that. Poor Chekov; he lost two years worth of experience that would have furthered his crewmates' impression that he's not just a boy.  
  
“So what's your question, Ensign?” Kirk asks, feeling guilty for the shortness of his tone.  
  
“I, ah, was thinking maybe you could tell me what Hikaru was like, while I was gone? I have asked Lieutenant Uhura and Mr. Scott but it seems like they don't like the subject. Was he very bad off? Hikaru doesn't want to talk about it, either, he says it's too soon.”  
  
Chekov looks worried, maybe even a little frightened. Kirk almost wants to put an arm around his shoulders, and he forgives Sulu again for leaving him alone in order to protect Chekov.  
  
“He, uh.” Kirk looks around the hallway, wanting some diversion to save him from this conversation, but they're alone. “He was bad, yeah, Pavel, but it's nothing you need to worry about. He didn't try to kill himself or anything.”  
  
“That is what he told me, too,” Chekov says. “But I would not have thought that he would try that. Still, he is – bothered by what happened, I think. He doesn't sleep, _keptin_ , and I'm worried. I wake up in the middle of our sleep cycle and he is at his desk, on his PADD. He says he's doing research, having insomnia, but I feel like he is not trusting me so much now.”  
  
Bones was right; Chekov is a genius, and he's figuring things out. Kirk rubs his hand over his eyes, wondering what Sulu has been looking at on his PADD. He wants to tell Chekov everything, to detonate that bomb right here in the middle of his ship.  
  
“You've just got to give him time, man,” Kirk says. “I know it's hard for you to understand, because to you it hasn't even been a week since you came back from that away mission, but for him it's been two years – ”  
  
“Yes, yes, I know this,” Chekov says. He stops there and blushes; it must be hard for him not to remind everybody, all the time, that he's usually a few steps ahead of them. “I am only – is there nothing I should know about Hikaru's behavior, or his experience while I was gone?”  
  
“I think you and Hikaru need to talk about this,” Kirk says, not willing to lie to the kid's face, his stomach twisting into knots as he inches away.  
  
“ _Keptin_ , please, he won't – ”  
  
“Chekov, everything is going to be fine,” Kirk says sharply. “Just – trust me. Hikaru will remember how to sleep, and everything will go back to normal in time. Now, please, I have to go.”  
  
“Yes, sir,” Chekov says sadly, and Kirk wants to spin around and tell him everything, but he also wants to keep Chekov's wide-open heart intact, and he can't do both.  
  
He decides he hates Sulu, then remembers that this isn't Sulu's fault, either. That night, he writes Sulu a long letter on his PADD, and deletes it after reading over it and recognizing the insane amounts of self pity that all his declarations of love and selflessness contain. He checks the clock, and wonders if Sulu is still at the gym, doing his fencing workout. On the off chance that he is, Kirk slides his uniform shirt back on and heads to the F deck.  
  
There are three people working out in the open mat area when he gets there: a compact girl from engineering who's doing some kind of yoga-gymnastics hybrid, a guy jumping rope, and Sulu on the other end, doing push-ups, his epee beside him on the mat. Kirk moves toward him like a coin that's been dropped from a tower, plummeting.  
  
“Hey,” he says, and Sulu drops to his knees, sitting back on them as he looks up at Kirk. He's red-faced, sweaty, out of breath. Kirk doesn't have much of a sex drive these days, but he wants Sulu in his arms, wants to feel the heat of Sulu's body against his clothes.  
  
“Hey,” Sulu says, dropping back onto his ass and folding his legs. “What's up? You need me?”  
  
Kirk smiles a little and looks down at Sulu's socked feet. He's not sure how he's supposed to answer that question.  
  
“Just wanted to see how you were doing,” he says. “And to tell you, uh. Chekov asked me about you today.”  
  
“You want to keep your fucking voice down, maybe?” Sulu says, standing up. He's unsteady on his feet, overworked, and Kirk catches him before he can fall over. Sulu allows himself to be steadied before stepping away.  
  
“Let me get you some water,” Kirk says, wanting to reach for Sulu's trembling arms.  
  
“I'm fine,” Sulu says. “Just, uh. What did he ask you about me? You didn't tell him anything, did you?”  
  
“Fuck no,” Kirk says. “You think I fucking would? Jesus.” He doesn't want to think about how badly he wanted to, how he could feel the words in his chest like a cancer that needed cutting out. “He was worried that you're trying to protect him from something that happened while he was gone. He's noticed that you're not sleeping.”  
  
“Fuck,” Sulu says, with such force that Kirk is worried he's going to get punched. Sulu drags his hands through his hair, drops of sweat flicking out of it, and suddenly Kirk has a sex drive again. He wants Sulu to fuck him right here on the mat, grunting and frustrated and close to passing out.  
  
“He's smart, Hikaru,” Kirk says, checking over his shoulder, but the jump roper is headed for the showers and the gymnast is far away, still absorbed in her routine.  
  
“He might be smart, but he's not creative enough to guess what happened,” Sulu says. “It's too – it would be impossible for him to believe. No, it's fine. Just don't tell him anything. He's got to expect things to be a little weird at first.”  
  
“Is that how things have been?” Kirk says. “Weird?”  
  
“No,” Sulu says. “Yes. I don't know. What do you think?”  
  
He starts pacing, his hands on his hips, and Kirk stands there watching him. It's the first time they've even talked in five days; Kirk has been careful to keep away from the bridge when Sulu is on shift. It's not that seeing him is all that hard or even dangerous, but he can't stand the way the crew looks at them, like they're all wondering how this must feel, erasing each other for Chekov's sake. They're wondering if Sulu still loves Chekov as much as he did two years ago, and if he ever really loved Kirk at all: the same things that pound the walls of Kirk's brain constantly. He can't stand it, so he stays clear.  
  
“I miss you,” Kirk says, because there's no point in trying to conceal this. “Am I allowed to say that?”  
  
“No,” Sulu says. He heads for the showers, but stops after three steps, maybe just because he forgot his epee. Kirk hands it to him, and Sulu holds Kirk's gaze as he takes it, their hands touching on the handle.  
  
“I can't sleep,” Sulu says.  
  
“I heard. Me either.”  
  
“This is fucked up.”  
  
“No kidding.”  
  
They stand there like that for awhile, and when Kirk's eyes flick to the gymnast, who is doing some sort of slow motion back flip, Sulu turns to look, too. Kirk lets go of the sword, and they both watch the girl as she goes through her routine, looking like a vision from another dimension, a window into some place where people move with slow, deliberate grace.  
  
“It's like I blocked access to the parts of myself that needed him,” Sulu says. “I still want him, I love him so much, and I know I need him, I do, if I lost him again I'd go out of my fucking mind. Waking up and having him there – and just the way he is, the way he gets excited about telling me what he was thinking about all day, while I was on my shift, and these dumb little comments he makes about my plants, trying to get interested in them because he thinks I want him to – I'd die without him. But then. Now I know that I wouldn't. That I didn't. It's fucking – I don't know how to live like this, and I hate lying to him.”  
  
“So don't,” Kirk says. “Tell him what happened. Why wouldn't he understand? I don't mind if he hates me. You guys can work past this.”  
  
“Jim, you fucking idiot,” Sulu says, suddenly all pinched up, his voice tight and his eyebrows arched. “Don't act like – fucking – don't act like you don't know why I can't sleep.”  
  
He goes then, the tip of his sword bobbing as he walks, and Kirk wishes he could feel encouraged by getting credit for Sulu's insomnia, but it's just another impossible thing. Add it to the pile, toss it on the flames. He sits down on the mat and watches the gymnast finish her routine, wishing that he had something like that to get him through the rest of his life, a way to crawl backward through the air, ignoring gravity.  
  
*  
  
Chekov goes back on shift several days later, and everyone applauds him when he walks out onto the bridge. His cheeks blaze and his shoulders hunch up a little as he smiles for everyone. Kirk wants to order his crew to stop congratulating Chekov for not dying, because it's embarrassing the poor guy, but he just claps along with the others. Sulu touches Chekov's shoulder as he comes to the conn, and gives him a secret _I told you this would happen_ look, transforming Chekov's smile into something genuine. Kirk waits to feel jealous, but he just feels left out, wanting to wave his arms and tell them, shouting, that he knows what just passed between them, that he recognized it and agrees with them on all counts, is totally on their side.  
  
At the beginning, there's a lot of invitations from friends intended to distract him, dinner with Uhura and Spock and cards with Bones, drinking with Scotty. Kirk doesn't really need their help, though he appreciates it and accepts the invitations, even when he'd rather be alone. He's getting a lot of work done, research he's been meaning to do for years, and he's getting in better shape, sometimes going to the gym twice a day. He wears himself down until there's no option except sleep, and he sleeps only on the couch, not in the bed, where he still hasn't changed the sheets since Sulu last slept in them.  
  
The Grotliun system looms on the horizon, and Kirk throws himself into preparing for it, researching the planets they're scheduled to visit and hypothesizing about the detours they might have to make. He spends a lot of time with Spock, whose presence is intensely comforting at a time like this, when Kirk doesn't want to get anywhere near his emotions. Spock is the last person who Kirk expects to be blindsided by. Even Bones has avoided the S-word for the most part.  
  
"Captain, if I might ask a personal question?" Spock says one night as they're packing away their reference materials on the Grotliun system. Kirk is only half-paying attention, his heart thudding; he doesn't like transitions from one activity to the next. They offer way too much time for reflection, and if he's not changed into his swimsuit and cutting furious laps through the pool in the next five minutes he's going to get bogged down by everything he's trying to avoid.  
  
"Sure, Spock," Kirk says, stuffing collapsible maps into his gym duffel. "Go ahead."  
  
"Have you ended your romantic relationship with Lieutenant Sulu?"  
  
Kirk gapes at Spock, scoffing a little, waiting for an explanation. Spock just stares at him calmly, finally raising one eyebrow when Kirk hasn't answered.  
  
"If it is too personal a question you may ignore it, of course," Spock says.  
  
"What – why the hell are you interested?"  
  
"Nyota has been speculating about your mental state since the return of Ensign Chekov," Spock says. "She has been quite worried. I have assured her that you're perfectly capable of serving as captain despite the personal complications – "  
  
"Tell Nyota that I'm a big boy and I can handle myself," Kirk says, this statement making him feel more juvenile than he has in a long time. He thinks of dancing with Uhura on the night of her wedding, the picture on Sulu's PADD that she told him about. He'd never seen her softer than she was when she told him that Sulu loved him. Maybe she's just burned about being wrong.  
  
"Forgive me, Jim," Spock says as Kirk heads for the door, and the use of his first name makes Kirk stop and turn back, though he's still huffing, caught off guard and feeling cornered.  
  
"I realize that this is a delicate subject," Spock says. "And I confess that I've never encountered a situation like this in my dealings with the human race, and certainly not with the Vulcans. We can be a very – possessive culture, when it comes to the objects of our affection. It is difficult for me to understand how easily you have separated from the lieutenant with the appearance of a rival."  
  
"It wasn't easy," Kirk says, wanting to throttle Spock, though he's also grateful, in a way, to finally have a chance to talk about this. "It _isn't_ easy. It's just what I have to do."  
  
"I do not understand, sir."  
  
"I know you don't."  
  
"Is Ensign Chekov aware that –"  
  
"No, and no one's going to make him aware."  
  
"I would not presume to do so, sir. The situation continues to puzzle me, however. It seems to me that under the current arrangement all parties would be dissatisfied, the ensign included."  
  
"Yeah?" Kirk knows he shouldn't like the idea, but he does. They're all connected in some indefinable way, and if Kirk feels shitty and lost and sleepless, a part of him wants them to go through the same hell.  
  
"Must Ensign Chekov sense that Lieutenant Sulu is longing to be elsewhere, sir?"  
  
"Elsewhere?"  
  
"With you, Jim." Spock's face softens for a moment, and Kirk wonders if Uhura asked him to make this attempt at conversation, thinking that Kirk would talk to Spock, that Spock's stoicism would be comforting. He scoffs and heads for the door, hating the idea of anyone speculating about his mental state.  
  
"I don't think he wants that, Spock. Look – tell Uhura I'm fine. We're all glad to have Chekov back, and it's going to work out. I'll get over it. See you tomorrow on the bridge, buddy."  
  
"Yes, Captain," Spock says, sounding a little disappointed. Kirk heads for the gym, where the pool is empty and waiting for him, no longer open to the public. Before he starts doing laps he dives down to touch the deep end, a firmly established routine. When he gets there he crouches on the bottom and looks up at the ten feet of water above him, holding his breath. He's mostly muscle, and it's easy to stay down, the quiet under the water making him feel like he's left the world behind. His lungs begin to burn, and he closes his eyes, remembering what it was like to look through the blackish lake water, Sam floating nearby, never breaking the surface first, no matter how determined Kirk had been to win before they went under. Kirk would panic, Sam's calm only making him more frantic to get air.  
  
He kicks off the bottom of the pool when the panic sets in, swimming for the surface, feeling too heavy to get there. When he breaks it and takes his first huge, panting breath, the silence of the empty pool area seems loud, Kirk's panting echoing off the walls. He feels dizzy, waiting for his brother to break the surface and laugh triumphantly, telling Kirk that he's dead. He keeps waiting for someone to show up and tell him that, so he can give up this business of trying to feel like he isn't. He takes off, cutting through the water, still breathless, and when he reaches the opposite wall he turns back, a shiver working its way up his spine. He feels like he's being watched, like he can hear his brother's laughter coming quietly from one of the giant room's shadowy corners. He needs sleep, but it won't come for another hundred laps, so he pushes off the wall, turns off his mind, and crawls through the water until he can barely pull himself out.  
  
*  
  
Things get worse. Sulu and Chekov seem to be everywhere, always together, and Chekov can't even offer Sulu coordinates on the bridge without Kirk burning with directionless resentment. He goes out of his way to be fair and friendly to Chekov, imagining that it irritates Sulu, who Kirk mostly ignores. Then, from across the mess, Sulu will sneak a timid look at him, and Kirk will feel it like a broken dam emptying into his chest. He'll have to hold onto the table he's sitting at to keep himself from catapulting over to Sulu and flattening him to the floor, drinking helpless moans from his mouth, ignoring the protests of Chekov.  
  
Kirk has trouble beating off, because he has trouble being alone in general. He hates his quarters without Sulu in them, the shadowy places seeming to whisper as he passes, making his eyes jerk around suspiciously. More and more often, he jerks awake thinking he heard his brother's voice in his ear. Nobody else calls him _Jimmy_ anymore, and if Chekov can come back from the dead, why not Sam?  
  
Bones seems to know that something is wrong, but also knows that Kirk isn't in the mood to discuss it. They talk almost exclusively about work, and Kirk starts avoiding their usual meet-ups, tired of that sympathetic look on Bones' face. When Kirk was fucked up at the Academy, Bones would get mad at him, not sympathetic. Kirk starts thinking about looking for fights, wanting his knuckles cut up like Sulu's, wanting to hit something until it stops moving. He dreams about childhood fights with his brother, that rage that only Sam could bring out of him, and wakes up trying to throw the ghost of his brother off his chest.  
  
He's just submitting to sleep one night, stretched out on the sofa with the data screen still playing, when the door to his quarters slides open. He's wide awake and off the sofa in a blink, his hand going to his hip, though there's no phaser there. Somehow it doesn't even occur to him that this isn't a mutiny or a haunting, that someone else on this ship does have an access code to his room, until Sulu is standing in front of him, grabbing his arms. He looks terrified, his hair mussed from sleep. He's in his undershirt and the blue sweatpants he would wear when he lounged around Kirk's quarters. Kirk is ready to take him to bed, can smell the weariness on Sulu's skin.  
  
"Did Pavel come by here?" Sulu asks, and Kirk frowns, shaking his head. It's the middle of the alpha shift sleep cycle. Sulu is still holding Kirk's arms out in front of him, his hands tight around Kirk's wrists.  
  
"He knows," Sulu says. "He found out."  
  
"Oh, shit," Kirk says, though the reality of this doesn't really reach him, because he's still snagged on wanting to grab Sulu by the ears and kiss his panting mouth.  
  
Sulu lets go of Kirk and starts pacing. He's barefoot, something that unexpectedly stabs at Kirk's heart.  
  
"How'd he find out?" Kirk asks.  
  
"I fell asleep – I fucking fell asleep, I'd been trying not to 'cause I knew this would happen."  
  
"What would happen?" Kirk is going to make Sulu a drink and fix everything for him, calm him down, make him get some rest. Then he'll never let Sulu leave this room. Chekov can visit on Sundays.  
  
"I said your fucking name," Sulu says. He crosses his arms over his chest, his shoulders curling in. "When I was asleep – or waking up, or whatever. 'Cause I'd. Gotten used to having you there. And I said 'Jim,' and that – he figured it out, got mad at me for lying to him all this time. He ran off somewhere – can you track him?"  
  
"Yeah," Kirk says. "But maybe he just needs to be alone for a little bit, to process this, it's a shock but he –"  
  
"Fuck no, he doesn't need to be alone!" Sulu says, his eyes narrowing. "He's not like us, Jim, he never needs to fucking be alone."  
  
"God, will you listen to yourself?" Kirk asks, ready for a fight, willing to throw punches if that's the only contact he'll be offered. "You've built him up to be this – mythical fucking creature who's made out of glass. Do you blame him for running off after he realized that you'd been treating him like your precious little idiot since he got back? How could you think that he wouldn't figure it out on his own?"  
  
"I know you're happy," Sulu says. He grabs Kirk's wrists again, yanking him forward. He feels stronger than he did before Chekov returned, from his own overtime in the gym. "This is what you wanted, right? You want him to leave me again so I'll be stuck with you."  
  
The look on Sulu's face when he hears what he's said is even worse than the words themselves. Kirk can see the fast change in Sulu's eyes when he realizes what he's just done, and that's what stings most of all, the pity that floods into them.  
  
"Yeah, that's exactly what I want, lieutenant," Kirk says, stepping back. Sulu won't let go of Kirk's wrists, so he yanks free, making Sulu stumble forward a little. Kirk has gotten stronger, too.  
  
"Jim, I didn't mean – "  
  
"Hey, you think it's _news_ to me that you never stopped wanting him back? You think I ever let myself believe that I wasn't just your second choice? Fuck no. Don't fucking look at me like I'm supposed to feel all betrayed. I never trusted you, Hikaru. You died when he did. Now you've both come back to life, and you're, what, addicted to dragging around like the universe owes you something? Missing it a little?"  
  
"Jim –"  
  
"No, fuck it, c'mon, let's track Pavel, let's find him and get him sorted out. I'll tell him whatever you want me to, Hikaru, I'll tell him I was just a hollow mercy fuck to you, that you woke up crying for him every night. That's true, though, right?"  
  
Kirk turns away, and Sulu grabs his shoulder, wheeling him around. Kirk waits to be punched, and the growling kiss that Sulu gives him stuns him harder than his fist would have. Sulu pushes coaxing noises into Kirk's mouth, begging to be kissed back, wanting transfer the blame. Kirk should shove him away, should tell him to fuck off and get his pathetic life back in order, but Kirk wants so badly to disorder it again, to be Sulu's complicated thing, his guilty pleasure, the comfort he's finally forced to take. He grabs Sulu's ears and hooks his fingers around them, biting at Sulu's lips, fucking Sulu's mouth with deep drags of his tongue.  
  
They end up on the floor, Sulu pinned beneath Kirk, his thighs opening when Kirk's hand sneaks beneath the waistband of Sulu's sweatpants. He's not wearing any underwear.  
  
"You came here to get fucked?" Kirk says, the feel of Sulu's cock in his hand making the air on the ship breathable again.  
  
"Fuck no," Sulu says, his eyes flashing darkly. Kirk gives him a squeeze and long pull, laughing deep in his throat when Sulu arches, his eyes falling shut. Kirk kisses Sulu's open mouth while he strokes him, hard inside his uniform pants, ready to fuck Sulu through the floor.  
  
"Bullshit," Kirk whispers in Sulu's ear, ready to play the villain, tired of being the sad sack. "You're calling my name in your sleep. You fucking need this, Lieutenant. Need my dick up your ass, in your mouth, my come all over your chest. That's where you like it, right, Hikaru? Or do you want it on your face this time, would that be dirty enough for you, my come on your eyelashes, in your hair –"  
  
Sulu's orgasm takes both of them off guard, and he growls through it, punching the floor as his come spills over Kirk's fist. Kirk pretends not to be surprised that Sulu could come for him so easily, and tries not to faint into thinking about how badly Sulu must have needed this, how often he must have thought of it. He pulls his hand from Sulu's sweatpants and stares down at him, unsmiling and unblinking as he brings his fingers to Sulu's mouth.  
  
"Suck," he says, like it's an order issued on the bridge. Sulu swallows down a whine and opens his lips for Kirk's fingers. They hold each other's gazes while Sulu cleans the come from Kirk's hand, until Kirk can't resist looking down at Sulu's mouth, his hungry tongue. He moans at the sight of Sulu lapping at his hand, getting every drop, then looks back up into Sulu's eyes, which are beyond debauched, so fucking surrendered. He's shaking between Kirk's thighs, afraid of what Kirk might allow him to do.  
  
Kirk isn't feeling particularly merciful. He feels pretty close to going out of his mind as he tears open the front of his pants. He's going to do this on the floor, fully clothed, Sulu's shirt pushed up and his pants pushed down. Just like the first time, when Sulu came looking for a fuck and got one. Kirk's not here to babysit him, to tell him what he shouldn't want.  
  
"Jim," Sulu cries when he's breached, and Kirk goes still, letting him adjust, watching him writhe. Sulu seems so out of it, truly lost, and he huffs something resembling a sob into Kirk's mouth when it closes over his.  
  
"Hikaru," Kirk says, and his voice is gravelly but the name comes out soft. He starts fucking Sulu in slow, shallow thrusts, watching his face, expecting him to lose his composure or come to his senses and push Kirk away. He just holds Kirk's gaze, his hands on Kirk's sides, fingers twitching when Kirk pushes in and relaxing as he slides out.  
  
"You're gonna stay right here on the floor and get fucked all night," Kirk says, though he knows this isn't true; Sulu is tight as fuck and Kirk is going to come hard in a matter of minutes. "Understood, Lieutenant?"  
  
"Yeah," Sulu says, and Kirk isn't sure where all this agreeableness is coming from, but he takes it for pure exhaustion and just fucks Sulu harder, faster, watching his eyelids lower as he's pushed across the floor with the force of it. Kirk leans down to work Sulu's left nipple between his teeth, swirling his tongue around the hard point, and when Sulu moans a cold spike of fear makes Kirk jerk upward, suddenly certain that someone is watching them, but there are no ghosts in sight.  
  
"What's – what's wrong?" Sulu asks, panting. Kirk looks down at him, not sure how to articulate his ghost problem, but maybe Sulu knows better than Kirk what it's like to be haunted. Kirk thumbs at the nipple he was playing with and leans down to lick into Sulu's mouth.  
  
"Shh, don't worry," he says, smirking. "I'm not gonna stop." He gives Sulu a hard thrust, bending down to suck at his neck when Sulu bears it for him. He wants to go all night but he can't, not with Sulu squeezing around him like he wants to suck Kirk all the way inside him, ragged and ruined beneath him. He's going to come, and he whines when he realizes he can't make this last much longer, sounding like a kid who's been told to come in for bed, that the fun's over.  
  
He hates himself for it, but what puts him over the edge is the thought of Chekov finding Sulu sleeping face down in bed, pulling his boyfriend's ass cheeks apart to see his dripping hole and blushing at the sight of how widely Kirk opened him. Kirk screams through his orgasm, screwing his eyes shut, vaguely aware of Sulu panting beneath him and how things are going to go when they come down from this.  
  
They lie tangled together on the floor afterward, and Kirk keeps his eyes closed, wanting to hide from the end of this reprieve. Sulu says nothing, just smoothes Kirk's eyebrow with this thumb, a post-sex quirk that Kirk has missed so badly that it makes his teeth ache to have it back.  
  
"I don't want to leave him," Sulu says, and Kirk keeps his eyes closed, listening. "He makes me happy. But now I know what it's like – being with you – and I don't know how to forget. I don't even want to forget."  
  
"You want to hear something weird?" Kirk says, carding his fingers through Sulu's hair. He's starting to feel human, his heart lurching back to life, ghosts receding.  
  
"Sure," Sulu says. "Something weird. Why the fuck not."  
  
"I don't think I want you to leave him, either," Kirk says. He's not looking at Sulu when he says this, but over the top of his head, his eyes unfocused, cheek pressed to the floor. "It's like you wouldn't be you if you did."  
  
Sulu laughs a little, unhappily. There's a knock on the door, and neither of them reacts immediately, Kirk's fingers still pushed into Sulu's hair. The moment that they jerk back to reality is simultaneous, and colder than anything Kirk has ever known. They dress quickly and without looking at each other, Kirk yanking off a sock and using it to mop up the come that's leaked onto the floor of his foyer.  
  
"Hide somewhere," Kirk hisses, and Sulu nods. Kirk can see that it's dawning on him, too, what they just did. Kirk's stomach is flipping over even before he pulls open the door and realizes that he should have expected to find Chekov standing there, because who else would it be?  
  
"Is Hikaru here?" Chekov asks as Kirk stares at him, his mouth hanging open. He feels monstrous compared to Chekov, hopelessly unsavable. Chekov is looking at him not with anger but defeat, as if he knows the answer to this question. For a moment Kirk can't help but see him as a child, someone who's only playing at being a grown-up.  
  
"Um." Kirk isn't sure which answer Sulu wants him to give, but Chekov is smart. He reads it on Kirk's face and nods.  
  
"I have been staying in Hikaru's room," Chekov says. "You haven't assigned me a room of my own. I have nowhere to go."  
  
Kirk's lungs seem to shrink until he can't draw breath, and he remembers Sulu standing in the same spot, saying the same thing. _I don't have a room anymore_. Kirk has taken everything they had, and now that he's faced with a Chekov who has nothing, he wants to die for what he just did.  
  
"Come in, please," Kirk says, wanting to wrap Chekov up in blankets and set him gently in Sulu's lap, but that's ridiculous. He's as bad as Sulu, behaving as if Chekov is made of glass. Chekov isn't crying, not even when he looks up and sees Sulu standing behind Kirk.  
  
"Pavel," Sulu says. His voice is broken in at least three places. If Kirk could take a whole shower of bullets for them right now, to erase everything, chiefly himself, he would.  
  
"Why should I come in there?" Chekov asks, his voice starting to pinch away. "Hikaru – you – you've humiliated me." He looks up at Kirk, his mouth set as if he's determined not to cry. "Is it true that everyone knew, _keptin_? Everyone has been lying to me since I came back?"  
  
"Pavel, the situation –" Kirk starts to say.  
  
"Baby, please, let's just go back to my room," Sulu says, pushing around Kirk and reaching for Chekov, who recoils. Kirk glances up and down the hallway, really not wanting to do this in public. He feels like he could get this worked out if he could just get the two of them closed inside his quarters.  
  
"I am not a baby!" Chekov says, trembling with rage, showing his teeth. "You were going to pretend for the rest of my life, Hikaru, that you didn't love someone else?"  
  
"I don't –" Sulu says, and Kirk tries not to hear it.  
  
"Pavel, please come inside," Kirk says. "You have to understand – nobody wanted to lie to you, but Bones said the shock of learning too much about what happened while you were gone, all at once –"  
  
"You blame this on the doctor?" Chekov says, glaring at Kirk, which is far more effective than Kirk would have expected, like the hardest slap he's ever felt. "I asked you, _keptin_ , I asked you to tell me what Hikaru was keeping from me, and you turned me away like I was a stupid child for thinking that there was anything wrong!"  
  
"It wasn't his place to tell you!" Sulu says, and Kirk isn't sure if Sulu is defending him or not. "Please, Pavel, it's only been a month, I was waiting for the right time –"  
  
"You're a coward," Chekov says, pulling away when Sulu reaches for him again. His chest is heaving now, his eyes getting wet. "Were you even glad when I came back, Hikaru? Or did you wish I had stayed dead, because you were done with me?"  
  
"Pavel, baby, please, how can you say that?" Sulu asks, dropping to his knees. He's crying now, but not sobbing, tears just sliding down his cheeks as he reaches for Chekov, trying to grab his knees.  
  
"Guys, this shouldn't be happening in the hall," Kirk says, looking around again. "Come on, please, we're all upset, we're all tired, let's get inside my –"  
  
"Will you stay the fuck out of it?" Sulu says, snarling at Kirk.  
  
"Don't be cruel to him for my benefit," Chekov says. He tries to step out of Sulu's grip and nearly falls over. "Now I know the truth, and you can be together – not that you were waiting for my permission, coming to him as soon as I was gone." Chekov switches to Russian, and for a moment Kirk thinks he's actually going to kick Sulu, but he just puts his hands over his face and groans into them, hiding his red eyes and looking like he wants to tear his skin off.  
  
"That's it, Jesus Christ!" Kirk says as a few people at the end of the hallway poke their heads out of their doors. "I order both of you to get into my fucking quarters right now. Hesitate and I'll put you in the brig. Don't fucking test me."  
  
Chekov stares at Kirk, stunned, and Sulu is still looking up at Chekov, trying to wipe his eyes clear. Kirk is actually kind of surprised when Chekov moves toward his room, and more surprised when Sulu follows. He walks in behind them, taking a deep breath, and he lets it out as the door seals shut. He feels better already, until he turns and sees Chekov crumbling to the ground, his face still hidden in his hands and his forehead pressed to his folded knees.  
  
"Baby, baby, please," Sulu whispers, sitting beside Chekov and pulling him close. Kirk wishes Sulu would stop calling Chekov _baby_ , but suddenly Chekov doesn't seem to mind, slumping over to bite out a few gasping sobs, his head in Sulu's lap.  
  
"I love you so much," Sulu says when Chekov's shoulders stop jumping, his body going limp in Sulu's lap. "I thought you were gone, I went crazy. And then you were back and I – I didn't want to hurt you, it wasn't fair, no time had passed for you, and I didn't want you to have to _understand_ , and I didn't want to move on, I wanted to go back to the way things were. Things were fucking perfect, and they told me you were dead, Pavel. I didn't believe it, I couldn't feel it, but you were gone, you were fucking gone." He leans down to bury his face against the back of Chekov's neck. Chekov is taking shuddering little breaths, his eyes shut and his lips trembling. Kirk feels like he should leave them alone, but he wants to sink to the floor and gather them both into his arms. Chekov is in his pajamas, too, that shirt from the box and a loose pair of green shorts, striped socks. For a moment Kirk feels like Chekov was with them this whole time, like their memories are his, too.  
  
"Pavel, I'm sorry I didn't tell you," Kirk says, wondering if he should speak or just leave them alone with their moment. "You had a right to know and we were stupid to try to protect you. And you don't have to worry. You two – fucking belong together, Jesus, look at you."  
  
Chekov lifts his head, sniffling, and Sulu glances up at Kirk, looking wounded, and grateful, too, because he won't have to make the decision himself. Kirk forces a smile, thinking about never again having Sulu like he had him tonight. It will be worth it if he doesn't have to suffer the soul-crushing guilt that he experienced when he faced Chekov while holding a sock that he used to wipe up Sulu's come. He shivers a little at the thought, squeezing the sock into his palm. Some grotesque part of him still gets off on this, on coming between them, forcing them to see each other through his eyes, and that's the thing that makes him certain that he needs to stay far, far away from them.  
  
"But, _keptin_ ," Chekov says, wiping at his face. "Hikaru still wants you."  
  
"What?" Sulu says, so cartoonish in his shock that Kirk almost laughs. "What – I – Pavel –"  
  
"You will always take me for an idiot, yes?" Chekov says, glaring at Sulu and pushing him away. "I told you, that was not the first time I heard this name 'Jim' when you slept. I did not even think of it as the _keptin's_ name until the third time I heard it. Do you think I will believe you can call for someone like that at night – so sad, Hikaru, you were so _sad_ – and not want them?"  
  
"It's more complicated than that, Pavel," Kirk says. "We – Sulu slept in my bed, that's all. I mean, well, that's not _all_ , but –"  
  
"Fuck, Jim!" Sulu says, glowering.  
  
"That you even call him Jim now," Chekov says, staring into space, looking delirious and heartsick. "That is part of a world I do not know, Hikaru."  
  
"It doesn't matter," Sulu says, shaking his head hard. "I won't lose you again, I fucking won't, Pavel. I love you, want to stay with you, please, _God_ , you have to believe me."  
  
"These are things that you want, maybe, but not what you need," Chekov says, scrambling up from the floor. “The way you said his name, when you were sleeping –” He shakes his head and curses in Russian, putting his hands over his ears like he's still hearing Sulu asking for Kirk in his sleep. Kirk feels sick to his stomach, and Sulu looks far worse, still kneeling on the floor as he watches Chekov go.  
  
Kirk turns back to Sulu, waiting to be told if he should go after Chekov or not, but it's like Sulu's the one who's stuck in a time loop now, elsewhere for a moment. Kirk tosses the come-stained sock to the floor, ready to do anything Sulu wants, though he knows Chekov was wrong, because he can't give Sulu what he needs. Nobody can, now. What Sulu is needs is for the past two years to be erased, so he could go back where he once belonged, with Chekov.  
  
“Hikaru,” Kirk says, bracing himself for Sulu's ranting and accusations, his hands thumping hard against Kirk's chest. Sulu just sits there, his mouth hanging open, eyes unfocused.  
  
“He'll come around, man,” Kirk says. “He's just hurt. He was going to be hurt either way, however he found out. He'll get that eventually. And you, you can – I'll change the code on my door if that'll help. I'll do whatever you want.”  
  
“Don't you miss me?” Sulu asks, lifting his eyes to Kirk's. He looks younger than Chekov ever has, there on the floor in his rumpled pajamas. Kirk stutters with surprise.  
  
“Well – yeah,” he says. “You know I do, but –”  
  
“Do you think I don't care what happens to you?” Sulu says. “You think I'm just worried about what I'm going through, and how I've hurt him? You really think I don't picture you sitting in here alone? That I would come here just to get fucked?”  
  
They just stare at each other, words failing to form in Kirk's mind. Sulu's resignation is eerie, and it's like he's not even hearing what he's saying, his eyes full of wounded confusion. Kirk starts to wonder where Chekov will spend the night, where he's run to.  
  
“You should find Pavel,” he says, offering Sulu a hand. “He needs you.”  
  
Sulu lets Kirk pull him up and walks toward the door, not really looking at Kirk or anything else. Kirk doesn't want to leave him alone like this, but it's not like they can go to Chekov together.  
  
“I'll track him,” Kirk says, grabbing his PADD from the round table in the center of the foyer, where he always dumps it after his shift. “Just give me a sec. I'll tell you where to find him, and you just – just sit with him, even if he won't talk to you. Don't let him be alone with this.”  
  
Sulu says nothing, and offers no indication that he's heard Kirk, who wants badly to take him to bed and be there when Sulu wakes up looking for him. He pulls up his special access programs and selects the security grid, but he hasn't even finished typing in Chekov's name before Sulu hits the door panel and steps out into the hall.  
  
“Hang on just a sec,” Kirk says, but Sulu shakes his head.  
  
“I think I have to go,” he says.  
  
“Yeah, but let me just find out where he –”  
  
“I'm no good for you or him or anybody. I have to go, Captain, I just – I have to get out of here.”  
  
Sulu wanders off down the hall, and Kirk scoffs, his PADD still tracking Chekov's location.  
  
“Are you serious?” he calls, but Sulu ignores him and rounds the corner. Kirk thinks of running after him, but he's not sure what he would do when he caught up. He's still thrown by the fact that Sulu referred to him as 'Captain,' as if his mind has been reset to the default. The program locks on Chekov, beeping to inform Kirk of its success in locating him. He's in the A-deck library, near the reference archives. Kirk stares at the little dot that represents Chekov, feeling an alarming tenderness toward that spot of light and thinking about when he would do the same thing with Sulu's. He tracks Sulu, too, thinking maybe they'll gravitate together without even meaning to, but Sulu is headed for his room, and when he gets there it stops moving. Kirk lets his imagination run free for a moment, but he's not really worried that Sulu would hurt himself. If he couldn't bring himself to do it when he thought Chekov was dead, he won't do it now, and anyway, he was just being dramatic. Kirk thinks about going to Chekov himself, but that probably wouldn't go over well. He puts his PADD down and goes over to his desktop data console.  
  
Chapel answers his video call in less than a minute, blinking a little heavily but putting on her best alert-for-captain face. Kirk wonders if Bones is asleep in the bed that he can see behind her, somewhere in the dark. He hopes not, doesn't want to get questioned about this later. He takes a moment to fret about the weird course that his friendship with Bones has taken lately before answering Chapel's _sir?_  
  
“I need your help with something,” Kirk says.  
  
“Of course, sir,” Chapel says, brightening a little at the opportunity to help. She's pretty much the exact opposite of Bones: young and blond with soft features, eager to please and more than comfortable taking orders from authority, cheerful and optimistic. The only thing she has in common with Bones is being stubborn as hell, something Kirk encountered the last time she treated him, insisting that he was not yet ready to leave his bio bed. Apparently she's more than comfortable giving orders to authority figures, too, when the situation calls for it.  
  
“You're friends with Ensign Chekov, aren't you?” Kirk says.  
  
“I guess so,” she says. “He was my running buddy, you know, before. But I haven't seen him much since he got back.”  
  
“Well, he – needs a friend right now. I would go to him myself, but I think you could venture a guess about why that might not work out too well.”  
  
“Oh – oh.” Chapel's mouth quirks, and she gives Kirk a sympathetic look. “Did he – find out – um –”  
  
“Expert diagnosis, nurse. Yeah, he found out. He's upset with Sulu, and Sulu is having a mini-meltdown. I think they're going to be okay, but I don't want Chekov to be alone tonight. Could you sit with him? He's in the A-deck library, in the reference section. Even if he won't talk to you, just sit with him, okay?”  
  
“Yeah, of course,” Chapel says. “Poor guy, it must be so –” She stops there, chewing her lip, and Kirk kind of hopes she won't work up the nerve to say whatever she's thinking, though, if he knows her, she will.  
  
“Captain, how are you doing?” Chapel asks, leaning a little closer to her monitor and lowering her voice. “Since – you know. Leonard and I have been worried.”  
  
“I know,” Kirk says, shuddering at the use of Bones' first name, which has always given him the creeps. “But I'm fine. Now get to it, Miss Chapel. You've got an excellent bedside manner and the kid's hurting pretty bad.”  
  
“Yes, sir,” Chapel says with a nod, and Kirk is reminded of Chekov, the way he gets when he's given an order, his jaw setting with determination to impress everybody, confident that he can save the day. Kirk gives Chapel a wave and logs off.  
  
He feels strangely unshaken, believing he can actually set this right and get all the pieces back into their proper places, but it might just be an artificial calm, brought on by the fact that he can still smell Sulu on his skin.  
  
*  
  
Kirk checks his PADD in the morning, but he's got no new messages that aren't entirely work-related, not even anything for Chapel. He tracks Chekov and finds his dot now in Chapel's room, Chapel's not far away, and he smiles. It's sort of charming, the though of one cherubic prodigy taking care of another. He checks Sulu's dot, and is surprised to find that he's in a corridor near the bridge, motionless and alone. His vitals are attached to his tracking signal, and Kirk pulls them up: everything normal, not even an elevated heart rate. He touches the man-shaped figure that represents Sulu, stroking the place where his left ear would be.  
  
“Fuck,” Kirk whispers, already in withdrawal. He goes to the shower and jerks off, gritting his teeth and taking a long time to finish, finally letting himself think about the night before, the way Sulu's dick went off as soon as Kirk offered to come on his face. He wouldn't really be into that, actually, but he's into the idea that Sulu could be.  
  
He keeps getting stuck on the things that seem like they're going to be okay, Sulu's admission that he's been thinking about him and the mental image of Chapel serving Chekov cinnamon sugar Pop Tarts and drying his tears. He'll catch himself thinking that this is something that can work out, but any potential solution ends with losing Sulu or stealing him away from Chekov and watching Sulu suffer without him, and Kirk doesn't want to think about the reality of either scenario.  
  
He skips the gym and goes to the bridge early, curious about what Sulu is doing there. Sulu isn't on shift for another three hours, and when Kirk sees him leaning by the lifts he's heartened for a moment by the fact that Sulu is wearing his dress uniform.  
  
“What are you doing?” Kirk asks, looking him over. Sulu looks nervous, seasick, and like he hasn't slept.  
  
“I need to talk to you,” Sulu says.  
  
“What's – why are you wearing your –” The last time Sulu wore his dress uniform was the day he cleaned out Chekov's room. If he tries to resign Kirk won't let him. He'll stop him somehow. He'll think of a way.  
  
“I need to request an official meeting with you, sir,” Sulu says. “It's protocol to wear a dress uniform when doing so.”  
  
Kirk gives him a long look, not even sure that this is true. Maybe it's some unspoken etiquette thing; Kirk has never been good with that kind of stuff. He groans and grabs Sulu's arm.  
  
“Fuck, Hikaru,” he mutters, dragging him toward the conference rooms. “You haven't completely lost your shit, have you?”  
  
“No, sir.”  
  
“That's good, 'cause you're looking kind of village-of-the-damned this morning. And fucking – stop calling me sir.”  
  
“Yes – okay.”  
  
They go to one of the smaller conference rooms, with just a modest desk and four chairs. Kirk sits on one side of the desk and Sulu on the other, as if he's been called to the principal's office or something. At one point Kirk had asked Sulu if he'd be into role playing, even offered that Sulu could be the captain once in awhile, but Sulu just laughed it off, to Kirk's disappointment. Back when Kirk was avoiding intimacy of any kind, role playing was his bread and butter in the bedroom. He supposes he can get back to that now. It would have been better with Sulu, though, with the force of everything real behind it.  
  
“Chekov's fine, by the way,” Kirk says, scoffing with surprise when Sulu doesn't ask himself.  
  
“I know,” Sulu says. “I spoke to Chapel. That was – good of you, to do that. I know you'll take good care of him.”  
  
“I'll take good care of him? What the fuck are you talking about? Hikaru, shit, stop acting like an idiot. You're not leaving Starfleet over this. We're gonna figure it out, somehow, it'll all –”  
  
“I know,” Sulu says. “I know I'll figure it out, but not here. And I'm not leaving Starfleet. We're entering the Grotliun system in two days. I'd like to volunteer to be a part of the first shift scouting team.”  
  
Kirk stares at him, waiting to make sense of that. There will be two scouting teams deployed for the duration of the Grotliun stage of the mission: one who will move ahead of the _Enterprise_ for the first six months, and another to relieve them for the second six months, providing that the first team survives that long.  
  
“No,” Kirk says. “Scouting is security detail.” Scouting is for crash-test dummies, people who sign up for Starfleet because they need to live within an inch of death as often as possible. They are unattached and childless and they know fully what they're getting into, but they're programmed for that sort of thing, proud of the tradition that they're a part of, akin to the first men and women who ever went to space.  
  
“Sir, I know you need good pilots for the _Enterprise_ , but think about it,” Sulu says. “It's the second six months when the course will get tricky for the main ship, but a great pilot for the scouting vessel could make a bigger difference early on. I stayed up all night looking at what we've got planned and this makes sense – ”  
  
“No,” Kirk says, scoffing, glaring at him. “No, it doesn't make sense, and I won't do it. We've got a guy from security who knows perfectly well how to operate the fucking scout shuttle –”  
  
“With all due respect, sir, Ripken is not a pilot.” Sulu's eyes are burning into Kirk's, and it's not like he's begging, it's like he's telling Kirk that the decision is already made. His hand is tight around Kirk's heart, squeezing it, threatening to let it pop between his fingers.  
  
“You need to calm down,” Kirk says. “You need to get some sleep –”  
  
“I can't sleep, sir,” Sulu says. Every _sir_ is like blow to Kirk's chest, knocking the wind out of him. Sulu is closed off, the secret places that he once let Kirk see buried again, hidden down deep. “I can't sleep, and I can't be here. I need to be away from the _Enterprise_ , I need to do this, to clear my head by serving you and everyone else on board, but I have to do it elsewhere. If you do not accept my proposal to join the first scouting team, I'll give you my resignation.”  
  
“You need to see Bones,” Kirk says. “Take a sedative, I'll take you off your shift –”  
  
“Jim, please,” Sulu says, his voice only getting harder, but Kirk can hear the tremble of the effort behind it. “What happened yesterday. I can't. I don't do that. Ever, I don't cheat, I'm not a cheater.”  
  
“I know, Hikaru –”  
  
“You don't know. You don't really know me, and now I know that he doesn't, either. I've kept – a lot of things away from both of you.”  
  
“Oh, bullshit, you only think you have –”  
  
“Jim – mother _fucker_ , will you shut up and listen to me?”  
  
Kirk raises his eyebrows, annoyed and impressed and dumbly attracted to Sulu when he's like this, his attempt at remaining collected crumpling, chest heaving under his dress uniform, hands spread open as he leans forward onto the desk.  
  
“I have to do this,” Sulu says. “Trust me. I know myself. I can't stay here and see you and him and not lose my mind. I can't –” He lets his voice break, pressing his lips together and looking away from Kirk for a moment, falling back into his seat. “I can't sleep,” he says when he looks back to Kirk, the words barely making it out past the tightness of his jaw.  
  
“I thought you didn't want to kill yourself,” Kirk says, feeling the color drain from his face. It would be unprofessional to deny Sulu this request, particularly considering that everyone on board knows what happened between them, and how Chekov's return has changed things. But he can't send Sulu out there in a puny little shuttle with only security detail for company. He won't.  
  
“I don't want to die,” Sulu says, shaking his head. “But I need to know that I can face this and come back in one piece. Then I'll know what to do, how to face my own personal bullshit. It will seem easy in comparison.”  
  
“Ha,” Kirk says. He thought the same thing when he decided to join the Academy. The personal demons only got louder when he tossed the professional ones in to keep them company.  
  
“Jim, please,” Sulu says. “I'm begging you. Trust me to do this. We need to be away from each other – last night – you felt it – we're bringing out the worst in each other right now. And Pavel – he doesn't deserve to have to look at me after what I did.”  
  
“What you did,” Kirk says. It's true that last night felt slimy and selfish as soon as he saw Chekov standing on the other side of the door, but before that it had been something else, if not a wholesome reunion then at least some of the best sex Kirk had ever had in his life, and part of it was the cheating, but that's still not the right word for it. To have to factor someone who's come back from the dead into issues of fidelity is not something Kirk is really equipped to do.  
  
“Please,” Sulu says. “Please, please just send me away. I can do this and come back. I need you to trust that I can.”  
  
Kirk says nothing, just stares at Sulu's hands, which are gripping the desk, those scarred knuckles ghost white. Kirk feels now like he knew that the last year of this mission would ruin him, and it was a mistake to brush away those feelings by assuming it was only the galaxy they'll travel through that was worrying him. It's more than that. It's the knowledge that everything is going to come apart at the seams when they're done here, even if they do make it through without losing anyone else, which is unlikely. People can be lost in a lot of ways. They can come back from the dead and get lost all over again.  
  
“I guess you've uploaded the forms for me,” Kirk says, raising his eyes to Sulu's, and there's a split second when he's sure that Sulu wanted him to keep refusing, to make him stay, but then Sulu smiles and nods and hands over his PADD.  
  
*  
  
Later that night, when someone comes pounding on the door of his quarters, Kirk knows to expect the same person who knocked politely the night before. Chekov isn't trying not to cry this time, but he seems mostly done with tears by the time Kirk opens the door, past sobbing and on into spitting anger.  
  
“How could you do this?” he asks, choking the words out wetly, his face softer than ever like this, moist and pink. His eyes are red and furious, nothing soft there.  
  
“Pavel,” Kirk says, almost wanting to tell Chekov that he had to leave his shift early because he couldn't concentrate, could only think of Sulu being captured and tortured by one of the merciless Grotliun races, holding out longer than the security guys, locked in a box until he lost his mind. Kirk left the bridge, ate lunch, threw up, and actually got a few hours of sleep in before spending another two hours staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, wondering how he'll stop himself from grabbing Sulu's arm and pulling him back when he tries to board that shuttle.  
  
“You are hateful, cruel, and worse, you are so stupid,” Chekov says as Kirk pulls him into his quarters to spare him from becoming a public spectacle. Chekov is so irate that he doesn't even seem to notice the change of location, and Kirk can see him shaking with the effort not to hit Kirk as hard as he can, his hands curled into fists.  
  
“He begged me,” Kirk says, the words high and tight in his throat, choking his airway. “He said he would leave Starfleet if I didn't let him do this.”  
  
“He was lying, you –” Chekov switches to Russian for the insult portion of this statement, and Kirk doesn't need to translate to know that he's using the worst words he knows, all of them. “He was bluffing, acting like a stupid child, only wanting your attention, and tomorrow he will regret this, and he will want to beg you to let him reconsider, but he will be too prideful to do it!”  
  
Chekov sinks to the floor then, growling and punching at the marble until his the skin on his knuckles breaks open. Kirk pulls him up, and for a moment Chekov is like a rabid terrier, thrashing and spitting and trying to fight his way free, then he's limp as a doll, hiding his angry tears in his hands as Kirk holds him up by the shoulders.  
  
“Pavel,” Kirk says. “I know. I hate it. I hate all of this. I wish I'd never let it happen. I wish I'd known that you were alive all that time. I feel like I should have, like I failed you, and him. I don't know how to fix this. I'm sorry, I just. I don't know what to do.”  
  
It's not something anyone wants to hear from their captain, and Kirk doesn't blame Chekov for storming away. He goes to the door and slaps his palm to the control panel, turning back to show Kirk his grief-ravaged face once more, wiping snot from his nose with the end of his sleeve.  
  
“You've killed him,” Chekov says. “You don't love him like I do or you would never have done this.”  
  
He goes then, and Kirk drops down to sit on the floor, jittery and light-headed, remembering suddenly that he hasn't eaten anything since throwing up his lunch. It's true that he doesn't love Sulu the way that Chekov does, but that doesn't mean he loves him less. He closes his eyes and imagines Sulu soaring through the minefields, issuing scouting reports that will save lives, pulling arrows from the limbs of his security detail.  
  
 _You're right, you can do this, I know you can, you'll be okay_. Kirk chants this in his head, over and over, sending it through the ship's invisible, untouchable networks and imagining it arriving in Sulu's mind as he lies alone in the dark of his room. He can see Sulu hearing this and knowing that it's true, just not recognizing that it's coming to him from Kirk, or from anyplace but his own mind. The ghost of himself that Kirk sent to Sulu's room kisses Sulu's forehead, touches his eyebrows, and watches him finally sink into sleep. He'll go where Sulu goes, and if Sulu decides to bring the ghost back with him when his job is done, Kirk will be alive again.


	9. Chapter 9

On the night before the scouting shuttle departs, Kirk has dinner with the five officers who comprise the first scouting team. It's rare to need a scout shuttle, but the Grotliun galaxy has outsmarted too many course-advance droids in the past, and nothing as big and important as a Federation flagship is allowed to enter the system without operating on continuous scouting clearance.  
  
Kirk can tell that the four other scouts aren't entirely comfortable with Sulu, maybe because they feel betrayed on behalf of their pilot, who has been pushed back to an auxiliary position, and maybe because of Sulu's reputation, either as Kirk's go-to combat specialist on away missions, go-to pilot in every situation ever, or as his fuck buddy. Whatever the case, it's a tense dinner, food specially shipped in from the last space station out this far that carries organics: lobster and steak, baked potatoes, grilled vegetables, all the sauces rich and buttery. Everyone stuffs themselves, and Kirk and Lieutenant Tan make most of the feeble attempts at conversation, Sulu silent at Kirk's side.  
  
When the dinner is through, Kirk's toasts coming out more stiffly than usual, he shakes hands with everyone on the team and dismisses them. Sulu starts to walk off, but he looks relieved when Kirk catches his elbow.  
  
“I can't spend my last night with you,” Sulu says. “Not after – ”  
  
“I know,” Kirk says. “It's okay. Go be with him. I don't care if he kicks you and tells you he hates you. He wants you there.”  
  
Sulu nods. They're standing outside one of the smallest formal dining areas on the ship, fake candlelight still glowing from within, lobster carcasses hollowed out on the abandoned plates. Sulu steps a little closer, looking back over his shoulder, but the others have gone.  
  
“Jim,” he says, staring at Kirk's shoulder. He's wearing his dress uniform. Kirk can smell his deodorant, edged with sweat.  
  
“I'm gonna kiss you,” Kirk warns, and Sulu nods eagerly, so Kirk grabs his shoulders and pulls him close. He licks into Sulu's mouth, tasting his sigh like it's frothy whipped cream, and understands what it costs to have the kind of kiss that most people only see from the dark of a movie theater: people have to know what it's like to be ripped apart cleanly before they can ever seal together like this. Kirk doesn't let the kiss last long, even with Sulu's tongue lapping hungrily at his as he pulls away. He doesn't want this to turn into something else that Sulu will regret. He kisses the side of Sulu's nose, sharp and wet, then crushes him into his arms. Sulu moans and wraps his arms around Kirk's back.  
  
“You're so fucking good,” Kirk says, not even sure what he means by that, just that he knows it's true. He pets Sulu's hair, resisting the urge to rock him in his arms like he's a reclaimed stuffed toy.  
  
“I'm not that good,” Sulu says. His voice is pinched, and his hands are scrabbling softly at Kirk's back like he's looking for something he can hold on to.  
  
“You're good enough for me,” Kirk says, pulling back. He grins, wanting the broken look on Sulu's face to disappear and never come back. “But maybe that doesn't mean much.”  
  
“I have to go,” Sulu says, stepping closer, his nose brushing against Kirk's. “I have to – have to go.”  
  
“I know you do.” Kirk kisses him with closed lips, soft like goodbye. “You fucking take care of my officers, alright, Lieutenant?”  
  
“Yes, sir.” Sulu's hands slide from Kirk's sides. Kirk is going to lose it soon, and so is Sulu, and they've got to separate before that happens.  
  
“I'll look forward to your reports,” Kirk says, and he steps back. Sulu does, too, nodding. He looks at the floor, opens his mouth, closes it.  
  
When he hurries away without saying anything more, Kirk knows that it's because he's lost his voice, and he knows why. It's not because Sulu thinks he's going to die or because he knows he'll spend those harrowing six months longing for Kirk. He's upset because he knows that when he does come back, it will be Chekov who he's missed more, Chekov he'll return to. They both know it, and Chekov probably does, too. He'll be there to see Sulu off when the shuttle leaves in the morning. Kirk will stay clear.  
  
He hears the lift at the end of the corridor slide shut, bearing Sulu away, and he turns around to stare at the empty plates. He walks to Sulu's, picks up the napkin that he nervously folded into a tight square, and tucks it into the pocket of his dress uniform. It's the only thing he has left for his Sulu box.  
  
*  
  
The reports that come back from the scouting vessel are sent to five PADD addresses: the captain's, the commander's, the head communication officer's, the pilot's, and the navigator's. Kirk and Chekov receive messages from Sulu at the same time, their eyes scanning quickly on the first read through, Kirk always glancing up at the back of Chekov's head when he's through, to see if he beat him to the end. The reports from Sulu are dry, strictly professional, as they should be, but they're both always looking for something secret in them. Kirk doesn't get any other messages from Sulu, and just the sight of his name on Kirk's PADD makes him want to hide the thing against his chest and stroke its cold, metallic cover.  
  
“Heard from Sulu?” he asks Chekov one night as they're crossing paths, Kirk on his way into the gym and Chekov on his way out. It's like this most nights; Kirk doesn't arrive until the gym is closing, and Chekov runs until they kick him out.  
  
“I haven't heard anything beyond what you have, sir,” Chekov says. He still looks like he wants to kill Kirk and like he doesn't care if Kirk knows it. The 'sir' sounds like another word for 'motherfucker' when Chekov says it. Kirk forgives him, but doesn't believe him, and he cuts his workout short that night so he can go back to his quarters and pry. He pulls up Chekov's received messages and is so surprised when he finds nothing from Sulu beyond the official reports that he double and triple checks, scanning through short notes in Russian from Chekov's father and long personal messages from Chapel that Kirk should definitely not be reading. His eyes catch on Bones' name.  
  
 _Leonard is the same way_ , Chapel writes in a message that was sent three weeks ago, just before Sulu left. _He'd cut his hand off just because I told him that he probably shouldn't._  
  
Kirk closes out of the program, wondering if Chekov has built some genius trap to be able to tell when the captain uses his override to break into it. He spends the rest of the night fighting the temptation to poke around in Chekov's PADD, wondering if there are dirty pictures of Sulu on it. Kirk could go back and pummel himself for never having taken any himself. Not that Sulu would have allowed it.  
  
He's lonely, avoiding Bones because he still doesn't want to talk about it, and doesn't like it that Bones lets him get away with that now. He declines invitations to spend rec time with Spock and Uhura, annoyed by their concern. In the mess, he sits with Scotty and Gaila, pretending to listen to them while he stares across the room at Chapel and Chekov, who always sit together, close enough to whisper.  
  
“The kid is stealing my girlfriend,” Bones says one night when he's cornered Kirk in the hallway. Kirk is on the way to the gym, and Bones looks kind of drunk.  
  
“I don't think you need to worry,” Kirk says. “He's not really her type. And vice versa.”  
  
“I don't mean he's trying to fuck her,” Bones says, seeming legitimately angry, or maybe just drunker than Kirk initially realized. “I mean he's taking up all her goddamn free time with his whining. He's moved into her room, did you know that?”  
  
“Ah – oh, really?” Kirk rubs at his eyes, not sure how he missed this. He thought Chekov was staying in Sulu's room, striving for a kind of symmetry that, come to think of it, he wouldn't even recognize.  
  
“Yes, really, sleeping on the goddamn floor like it's a slumber party. Why'd you have to push him onto her, Jim? Things were going so good, and now it's like I'm your ally and she's his and she gives me these looks like I should just stay out of it.”  
  
“Yeah, sorry,” Kirk says. “All I do outside of the bridge is fuck things up. Remember? Shouldn't be a news flash to you.”  
  
“Oh, shit, here we go with the self-pity,” Bones says, making such a deeply disgusted face that Kirk almost laughs, because he's missed Bones' deep disgust. “And don't get me started on the bridge. I'd say you fucked that pretty royally when you let our best pilot ride off into the sunset to be canon fodder.”  
  
“He'll be fine,” Kirk says, darkening in a way that actually seems to register with Bones, who backs down a little.  
  
“I know that,” Bones says, throwing out a hand. “But he belongs on the alpha shift and you fucking know it. This is approaching emotional compromise, Jim.”  
  
“Bullshit it is. He came to me with a perfectly logical proposal, and he was right – the first six months aren't going to be tricky for the big girl, but this is when those scouts need every fucking resource we can give them, so they can get their job done and keep us safe.”  
  
“Perfectly logical,” Bones says with a scoff. He crosses his arms over his chest and sighs, shaking his head.  
  
“I've missed getting taken to task by you, pops,” Kirk says, jabbing Bones in the side. “'Bout time you gave up your agreeable act.”  
  
“You're right it was an act,” Bones says. “Christine's idea. Give you a break, she says. He's had a hard time, she says. Don't know what I was thinking, listening to that sentimental garbage. Someone has to tell you to pull your head out of your ass eventually.”  
  
“Good to have you back, Bonesy,” Kirk says, grinning. “You want to come work out with me?”  
  
“Hell no, I've got better things to do.”  
  
“'Atta boy.”  
  
Kirk heads into the gym, still smiling, and almost crashes into Chekov as he's leaving. Chekov's mouth quirks like he's just barely stopped himself from telling Kirk to watch where he's going.  
  
“Excuse me, sir,” he says instead, mumbling. He looks ragged, underweight, his curls limp from his post-run shower.  
  
“Not a problem, Ensign,” Kirk says. He knows that Chekov hates him even more for using his gym privilege, that Chekov would love to have the whole place to himself.  
  
“Sir?” Chekov says when Kirk is in the doorway of the front entrance, nodding to the maintenance guy.  
  
“Yeah?” Kirk says. He stands there waiting while Chekov shuffles, staring at the floor.  
  
“Have you – heard from him?” Chekov asks. It's been over a month. Kirk shakes his head.  
  
“He's busy, that's all,” he says, hoping that Chekov will hear the buried hurt in his voice and that Kirk is telling the truth, not trying to spare Chekov's feelings. Chekov nods glumly and turns to go.  
  
“Hey, Pavel,” Kirk calls, and he stops, turning back. He actually looks hopeful, which is an improvement over hateful.  
  
“You can – you can get in on this gym schedule if you want,” Kirk says, tilting his head toward the front lobby. “I mostly use the pool and the weight room, so if you want to use the track while I'm here, after closing time, that's okay by me.”  
  
“Thank you, sir,” Chekov says, his jaw tightening again. “But I do not want any special privileges.”  
  
“It's not a special – I mean – you're a serious athlete.”  
  
“There are many serious athletes in your crew, sir,” Chekov says. Kirk kind of wants to wring his neck as that old smug look jumps into his eyes. “I thought you were aware of this?”  
  
“Fine, be a little shit,” Kirk says, because he's got rank and because he's been staring at his PADD, too, waiting for the messages from Sulu that don't come. Chekov seems taken off guard, and he blushes.  
  
“You want to sit down and hear about the way he never stopped talking about you?” Kirk asks. “Would you believe it if you heard it from me? You should fucking thank me, Pavel. If it wasn't for me, listening to all the goddamn ghost stories, you might have come back to find he'd turned into someone you didn't recognize.”  
  
“Someone I did not – that is exactly what I found!” Chekov says, his gym bag jerking in his fist like he's struggling not to throw it at Kirk. “How can you – you didn't know him before, you don't know what it was like!”  
  
“Yeah, actually, I do,” Kirk says. This is the only way they're ever going to get past this and have any kind of working relationship that at least makes being on the bridge together tolerable. Probably.  
  
“I got the play by play of everything Chekov-related for almost two years straight while you were gone,” Kirk says, walking closer. Chekov is huffing his breath, still thrumming with adrenaline from his run.  
  
“Yeah, I got to fuck him,” Kirk says. “But I kept him alive for you, let him worship you and hold you high above my head, so don't fucking imagine that I bulldozed my way in as soon as I could. You know me better than that.”  
  
“I know you're a bastard,” Chekov says, showing his teeth. “You want – what – an award for letting him talk about me? You want my appreciation? You are unbelievable. What bothers me more than anything else is that, of all the people on this ship, it was _you_ he chose. Why? I do not understand it.”  
  
Chekov storms away then, and Kirk slams into the gym. He's too furious to even put his swimsuit on, and he does his laps naked, growling his breath out, imagining himself as some kind of Olympic gladiator who, after this leg of the competition, will walk into a ring with Chekov to fight him to the death. The crowd would roar with laughter at the prospect of Chekov actually trying to take him on. Chekov would cower and beg forgiveness. Kirk would grant it only because it would humiliate Chekov deeply.  
  
He's still angry after his workout, and he drinks from his supply of Romulan ale just to get somewhere close to sleep, or at least passing out. The Romulan stuff only seems to fuel his rage, and he picks up his PADD, wanting to smash it into pieces when there's no message from Sulu. He thinks of looking through Chekov's received messages again, but he's afraid there will be sympathetic words from Chapel, who will be aghast at Kirk's behavior. He wants to send a message to Sulu, but it would be a dangerous distraction, so he just throws the PADD hard against the sofa and drinks more ale.  
  
His dreams that night are bad: a giant alligator is eating two of his crew and he can do nothing but watch. A woman is getting attacked and he wants to help, but he's been deaged into a child, hiding under a bed. Sulu is floating under the water across from him, holding his breath, and he won't come up even when Kirk gives up, letting him win.  
  
He wakes up looking for Sulu, his hands sliding across the sheets, and he's so out of it that he thinks he'll actually find him, that Sulu's warm shoulder will be there, that he'll turn onto his back with a moan and close Kirk into his arms. Kirk is halfway to feeling dejected when he realizes that he's so sure that he'll find someone in bed with him because he's not alone in the room. His skin ices over, and by the time he turns his eyes to the end of the bed he knows who'll be there.  
  
“Hey, Jimmy,” Sam says, and Kirk tries to scream, but his voice comes out in worthless choke. Sam laughs. He's sixteen, strung out, skinny as a rail, silvery in the dark room.  
  
“And everyone thought I was the fuck up,” Sam says. “I would have turned that shit around, gotten past my angry teenage phase. You refuse to remember the good parts of me because that was all the stuff you never had. People liked me. I didn't overcompensate and act like an ass to hide the fact that I was a wibbly little loser deep down. I didn't have to try the way you did, so fucking hard, needing everyone to love you best. Letting my friends fuck you because you thought that would make them like you? Jesus Christ. Even mom hated that about you, Jimmy, the way you needed everyone's approval. Not like a normal kid who didn't give a fuck. I guess it's not a secret that she liked me better.”  
  
“Shut the fuck up!” Kirk shouts, his heart ratcheting as he throws a pillow at the ghost. It sails through Sam's translucent body, and he laughs hard.  
  
“I liked you,” Sam says. “I was a good brother. So what if I kicked your ass sometimes? You needed it. And now I'm this fucking villain in your memories, and you're poor little Jimmy who had to take care of mom. What a load of horse shit. You couldn't take care of of a goddamn goldfish, and this ship is never gonna see Earth again. Of all the selfish motherfucking things you could have done, Jimmy: a starship captain? You need some laughable little connection to dad that badly, to take all these lives into your incapable hands?”  
  
Kirk rushes the ghost with a furious groan, and it disappears as soon as he touches it. He ends up on the floor, his head throbbing and his chest heaving, and when he wakes up there in the morning he tries not to remember his dreams.  
  
*  
  
A week later, they lose communication with the scouting team. Kirk makes relocating them everyone's first priority, and tries not to think about what will happen to him if Sulu is lost. He's waking up to his brother's cruel laughter on a regular basis now, and twice he's walked down to sick bay and slept on the sofa in Bones' office while Bones sits at his desk doing paperwork, keeping guard. Kirk hasn't told Bones, or anybody, about what's happening, but something is definitely happening and it's not going away. If Sulu is gone, Kirk will be eaten alive by his delusions, the past, the pointless future. He's thought about how the reality of the sucked out the airlock game, what those seconds before space crushed him would be like.  
  
He distracts himself from his own misery by focusing on Chekov's. They work together to try to locate the silent shuttle, not looking each other in the eye, focusing on maps and readouts, muttering quietly and giving each other's theories more weight than everyone else's. Chekov snaps at an engineer and Kirk doesn't reprimand him. Kirk miscalculates a flight path in one of his hypothetical scenarios and there's real tenderness in the way Chekov politely corrects him, no sarcasm.  
  
After two weeks with no word from the shuttle, Kirk is sleepwalking during the day, jumping when he hears the voices of the younger ensigns coming around corners, thinking Sam will be among them. Bones rants, and when he slaps sedatives in Kirk's hand Kirk doesn't fight him, just makes Bones promise to be there at his desk when Kirk wakes up on the sofa in his office, or to at least leave the door open if he's got work to do out in sick bay. Bones mistakes this as worry for Sulu, and Kirk almost wants to tell him that, no, this is his dead brother coming to pull him down to hell, just to see what sort of look would jump onto Bones' face.  
  
Whenever Chekov has rec hours, Kirk tracks his signal to make sure that he's not alone. Chapel is good about keeping him company, and sometimes Kirk and Chekov haunt sick bay at the same time, Kirk huddling in Bones' office while Chekov volunteers to help Chapel restock supplies, clumsy with exhaustion, apologizing as he scatters Q-tips on the floor. Any excuse not to be alone.  
  
One day, Kirk is coming off shift, dragging back to his quarters and dreading the thought of changing his clothes before zipping away to find Bones, and he tracks Chekov on the way there. He finds Chekov's dot not in sick bay with Chapel or running on the treadmills between the dots of two other crew members, but alone in Sulu's room. Kirk stands outside his quarters, waiting to see Chekov's dot move, but it hovers in the same spot, and Kirk hurries along toward it, trying not to think about how happy he is to have a reason not to go into his haunted quarters, or how alien the gravity feels against his heavy footsteps. He's getting close to unfit for duty, but he has to find Sulu first.  
  
He knocks on Sulu's door when he gets there, realizing with some alarm that he still hasn't seen the inside of Sulu's quarters, at least not since the glimpse he got around York's shoulder. Chekov pulls the door open, looking even more haunted than Kirk feels, bags under his eyes. He's wearing Sulu's clothes, everything too big for him.  
  
“I was sleeping, _keptin_ ,” Chekov says, as unguarded as a baby bird, blinking at Kirk and looking like he hasn't actually slept in days.  
  
“You shouldn't be alone,” Kirk says. Chekov scoffs, but he steps out of the way, letting Kirk come inside.  
  
Chekov slumps onto the bed and Kirk circles the room, looking at Sulu's old familiar things. The plants are wilting, and Kirk hurries to get them some water.  
  
“Let them die,” Chekov moans into his pillow. “I don't want to look at them if he's gone.”  
  
“Don't be dramatic,” Kirk says, his ribs aching like the stiffening limbs of a dying spider, starting to curl around his heart in defeat. “We're going to find him. It's a tricky system, it hides things from you, you know this.”  
  
“It has been two weeks,” Chekov says. “There is nowhere else to look. You took him from me. Is this what you wanted?” He moans and pulls at his hair, clearly hating himself for acting like this, so Kirk doesn't bother to add his own reproach.  
  
“He had the opposite reaction when he thought he'd lost you,” Kirk says as he waters the plants, stroking the leaves of the sentient ones, his eyes burning when he sees how they've been neglected since Sulu has been gone. They seem to perk up until they realize that he's not Sulu, wilting again.  
  
“What are you talking about?” Chekov asks, still mumbling into the pillow. He's even wearing Sulu's socks, the fancy black argyle ones that Kirk teased him about. The over-sized clothing makes Chekov seem even younger, and Kirk feels like he's ready to tell him a bedtime story when he sits down on the end of the bed.  
  
“He wanted to look at things that reminded him of you,” Kirk says. “Did he tell you about his Chekov box?”  
  
“His what?” Chekov turns a little, opening one eye to look at Kirk.  
  
“He had this mysterious box – okay, let me start at the beginning.” Kirk grins, as if it's an easy memory. Compared to what's happening now, it feels that way. “He wouldn't leave your room for – I don't know, a month? And even after he came back on shift, he'd go straight to your room afterward, hide under the blankets on your bed. Didn't change the sheets for, man. Had to be a year?”  
  
“You're lying,” Chekov says, frowning. “Hikaru would not be that disgusting.”  
  
“He was totally disgusting when it came to you,” Kirk says. “A year later, when he finally let us clean your old room, he gathered up this box of things that had belonged to you, and he kept the box in the room, and he'd go and visit it, touch all of your old stuff, look at your old pictures, and he – there was some kind of dream journal that you'd kept?”  
  
“He told you about that?” Chekov asks, sitting up. There's some color in his cheeks now, his eyes brightening a little.  
  
“Hell, Pavel, he told me everything! He never stopped talking about you. He was your personal historian. What, he didn't tell you that he read your dream journal every night, that he sat in your old room getting emotional about the fact that you wanted to dream about candy when you were five?”  
  
Chekov chews his lip and makes a soft noise, almost a hiccup. He smiles a little, scrubbing his hand over his eyes.  
  
“So sentimental,” he says, sniffling.  
  
“Oh, and little criticisms like that? Like the fact that you thought he was sentimental? He was still obsessed with them, it was kind of sad. Your opinion was fucking everything to him, man, if you laughed off some story about his childhood he would be all secretly wounded, telling me about it years later, still torn up about the fact that you didn't understand his poetic soul or whatever.”  
  
Chekov laughs, wiping tears. He studies Kirk for awhile, his smile fading but not disappearing completely.  
  
“He was like this with you, too,” Chekov says. “Before – before I was gone. If you gave him a suggestion on the bridge he would get so angry! I would say, Hikaru, you cannot take these things personally, the _keptin_ is only trying to help, and he would huff and act like this was something I did not understand, his deep, personal hurt at being told to use a warp 5 instead of 4, like this was a blow to his manhood. He would say, 'it's not what he said, Pavel, it was his _tone_.'”  
  
“Damn,” Kirk says. “How'd we put up with him, right?”  
  
Chekov drops back to the pillow to cry, and Kirk puts his hand on Chekov's socked foot. Chekov doesn't kick him away, doesn't even flinch in Kirk's grip. The ship already feels less haunted.  
  
“Let's sleep for a few hours,” Kirk says. “Then we should go over those Oppa-16 quadrants again. I feel like there's something we missed there.”  
  
“Yes, _keptin_ ,” Chekov says, sniffling into his pillow. Kirk stretches out on the floor, and he's just getting comfortable when Chekov's head pokes over the side of the bed.  
  
“You could sleep up here,” he says.  
  
It's a double, so there's no need to press together. Kirk sets an alarm and turns toward Chekov, who rolls over to face him. Kirk tries to see him the way that Sulu did, in this bed: the desirable young body, his vulnerable eyes, and those freckles across his nose that are rubbed raw from crying.  
  
“My mother said she knew in her heart that I was not dead,” Chekov says after Kirk has turned the lights down, no longer afraid of ghosts with a talisman as powerful as Chekov so close by.  
  
“This was why she separated from my father,” Chekov says. “He told her she was fooling herself. She said, 'how can you not know our son is alive?' The truth is, neither of them knew it, but my mother wanted to believe and my father wanted to cling to his reason. My mother never understood how that comforts him the way that her beliefs comfort her. She is a scientist, but she is also faithful, a Jew. That's supposed to make me one, too, but I never wanted to chose between them. Now I think: I know that Hikaru is not dead, but I also know that I don't really know anything.”  
  
“He's not dead,” Kirk says. He imagines that he can feel it like a faint light between their chests, something that they can conjure with the force of what they both feel for Sulu.  
  
“How can you say that?” Chekov asks, his voice full of pure wonder, lacking judgment. Sulu was wrong about Chekov; he was never judging Sulu as harshly as he feared. Kirk wonders if that means he could be wrong about Sam, then shoves the thought away. It's not as if he's really villainized Sam, anyway. That fucking ghost doesn't know shit about how much Kirk loved his brother.  
  
“I don't know how I know, I just do,” Kirk says, though he doesn't, and it's killing him. Still, Chekov's own uncertainty has a calming effect. Chekov in general has a calming effect.  
  
“That's another thing he was still fretting over after you were gone,” Kirk says. “The fact that you thought he was a fool for believing in souls.”  
  
Chekov scoffs. “Why, because he thought that I was not in his fairy-land heaven, with fluffy clouds?”  
  
He goes quiet then, and Kirk waits for the high, tiny whine that means Chekov is trying not to cry before pulling him forward, into his arms. He expects Chekov to fight him, but he doesn't, probably pretending that Kirk's chest is Sulu's, and that the hand that cups his cheek is the one they both love, the hand that steered them here and left them drifting.  
  
*  
  
The scouting shuttle is located just two days later, and it only takes five hours to finally establish communication, through some monkey-wrenching by Scotty and Uhura, who are at each other's throats throughout their entire collaboration, then bouncing in each other's arms when the first crackle of acknowledgement comes in through her station.  
  
“Shuttle 79-B, this is Captain Kirk,” Kirk says, pushing them away, feeling Chekov's eyes on his back from the conn, feeling time stretch into a fine sheet of glass that will either break or just go on being breakable for a little longer.  
  
“Captain, this is Lieutenant Sulu,” Sulu answers, and Kirk breaks into a breathless laugh, trying to hide it from the rest of the room, but Scotty slaps his back.  
  
“We're all fine, sir,” Sulu says. The connection is too poor to reveal any hint of emotion in his voice. “We've been trying to contact you for over two weeks.” He almost sounds a little irritated, and Kirk laughs again. He can hear Uhura and Chekov talking in excited Russian behind him, can imagine them jumping for joy like most of the rest of the bridge is, people laughing and clapping and cursing with embarrassed relief.  
  
“I don't know how much longer we'll have a vocal link,” Kirk says. “You should be able to send data directly now, though. Are we showing up on your networks?”  
  
“Yes, sir,” Sulu says. “I've been keeping a log – should I send that as a report before writing anything formal?”  
  
“Absolutely, Lieutenant. Good work, by the way.”  
  
“I – thank you, sir,” Sulu says, like he doesn't understand what he's being congratulated for. Kirk shuts his eyes for half a second and allows himself to picture Sulu stepping down off of the transport platform and into his arms, the way Sulu's neck would taste and how Kirk would let everyone see him press his lips against it. He shakes free of the fantasy and turns to his crew, who converge on him with wordless relief, slapping his arms and his back, his shoulders. Chekov comes forward to beam at him.  
  
“You were right about rechecking Oppa-16 again, sir,” Chekov says, his eyes shining with the admiration Kirk has missed more than he realized.  
  
“I'm right once in awhile,” Kirk says, fighting the urge to give Chekov's chin a friendly tick as he walks by.  
  
The report comes from Sulu, and Kirk invites Chekov to conference room 18-A to read it. There's already a celebratory party raging on the deck below, but they both eschew it in favor of spending hours going over the logs and the official report, making notes on the phenomena that prevented the shuttle from communicating while they search Sulu's words for anything personal. There's nothing.  
  
“Has he messaged you yet?” Kirk asks, because he's sure that Sulu will, at least to dryly apologize to Chekov for worrying him. Chekov checks his PADD and shakes his head.  
  
“You?” Chekov asks.  
  
“Nope. Guess he's busy.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“We should message him, though. I don't think that would be inappropriate.”  
  
“Ah, yes, sir, I agree.”  
  
They spend the next hour on opposite sides of the desk, Chekov chewing his lip as he composes his message to Sulu, Kirk rubbing at his eyebrows, his elbows on the desk as he leans over the PADD. He can hear hints of the party coming through the vents, music and the occasional group cheer. His message to Sulu isn't long, but it's taken a long time to write, mostly because he's wondering what Chekov is saying.  
  
 _Hikaru,  
  
Just a note to say that everything here is fine. You were probably concerned, since we haven't heard from each other in weeks. Pavel is doing well. I forgot what a little pain in the ass he is, and how funny he can be, how mean. But it's an innocent meanness? I think that's what you misunderstood in his stories about his father, thinking he would be this hard man because of what he demands from people. It's the opposite – it's this softness that they have, this naïve expectation that everyone will want to try to be as good and honest and hardworking as they are. And I don't think they see themselves as any of those things, so they don't think that other people would have to hold themselves to any particular expectations – they think the way they are is the natural state because they lack a certain creativity which allows them to continue to be this way (the lack, I mean to say, is what allows this – to put it in really crass terms it's like they lack original sin or something)? Does that make any sense?  
  
I don't know, I'm pretty out of it. It's been a hell of a few weeks. I should go downstairs and get drunk. They're having a party, but I don't really feel like celebrating. It's only the beginning of this thing and we're already having these kind of problems. It's not like I'm worried, but Pavel was pretty upset. He's not taking care of your plants, by the way. I think I should keep them in my room while you're gone. Let me know what you think about that.  
  
Well, I wish to fuck you were here but it's not like that's news to you.  
Later,  
Jim_  
  
He wants to ask to read Chekov's message, but doesn't. They send them simultaneously, and make muttering excuses about needing to be elsewhere afterward, so they can wait for their responses in private.  
  
Kirk never gets one, and he can tell, by the set of Chekov's shoulders on the bridge the next morning, that he didn't, either.  
  
*  
  
Eventually, Bones and Chapel get tired of babysitting them, and Kirk and Chekov are left with each other. Kirk still can't sleep without waking to his brother's voice, though he hasn't actually suffered a full-scale hallucination since he drank that Romulan ale. Chekov, meanwhile, is wilting like Sulu's plants without word from him. Sulu offers nothing but the scouting reports, and Kirk is starting to get pissed off about this more on behalf of Chekov than himself. They sit together in the mess, protected by the forcefield of their public misery, and Kirk knows people must wonder how they can be friends.  
  
They're not friends, exactly, but no one else wants to suffer them, so they keep each other company. After alpha shift, they eat in the mess, and then return to Sulu's room together, Kirk with the excuse that only he knows how to properly care for Sulu's plants. Chekov will watch him doing this irritably, under the pretense that he's trying to learn so he can do it himself, but the day when he's willing to take over the responsibility never comes. When the plants are taken care of, Kirk does clerical work at Sulu's desk, his eyes wandering to the picture of Chekov that Sulu keeps there, one of him when he was only seventeen, grinning and wearing the knit hat from the Chekov box, the tag still dangling from the left ear flap. Chekov stretches out on the bed behind him, reading and muttering to himself as he makes calculations on the side project he's working on, which involves the causes for spontaneous time travel.  
  
“Figured it out yet?” Kirk asks him every night, just before they head for the closed-down gym together. Chekov glares at him every time.  
  
“No,” he'll say before burying his face in his data pads again. Kirk often has to bodily drag him to the gym. The physical exercise does him good, and he's always in a better mood afterward, chatty and prone to hand gestures as they walk back to Sulu's room together.  
  
They don't talk about Sulu. Kirk sleeps on the floor.  
  
“I'm being haunted by the ghost of my dead brother,” Kirk tells Chekov one night when they're drinking vodka together, hunched over a chess board. “In case you were wondering why I insist on sleeping here.”  
  
“Oh.” Chekov rubs his chin. He's sober as hell, despite the fact that he's had more than Kirk. “I had assumed it was because you wanted to sleep close to Hikaru's things.”  
  
Kirk laughs, and makes himself take another drink before he can make a joke about the fact that Chekov is one of Hikaru's things, the brightest, most expensive artifact Sulu owns, the one that keeps Kirk's ghost away just by virtue of belonging so completely to Sulu, who once served the same function.  
  
“No, it's my dead brother, he chases me out of my quarters,” Kirk says, nodding down at the board. “Got nothing to do with Hikaru. Fuck him. Won't even answer my question about his plants.”  
  
Chekov scowls at the pawn in his hand, then closes it into his fist. He pours himself more vodka.  
  
“Hikaru is selfish,” he says.  
  
“Yep,” Kirk says.  
  
“If it were up to him he would try to keep both of us.”  
  
“Probably true.”  
  
“He needs you to give him one thing and me to give him another. He thinks he deserves to have all of it, even if he pretends to feel guilt.”  
  
“The asshole. So, I don't know if you noticed, but I told you I'm being haunted by my dead brother. You seem kind of unsurprised.”  
  
“Oh.” Chekov looks up. “I thought you were being metaphorical.”  
  
“I might be, actually. That remains to be seen.”  
  
Chekov grins, and Kirk does, too. He makes himself look down at the board. He's been staring at that picture on Sulu's desk too much lately, wondering if Sulu fucked Chekov after buying him the hat, if Chekov wore the hat and nothing else, and trying to envision how that would look, the tassels on the ear flaps bouncing. He's started jerking off again, in the shower at the gym, timing it so that Chekov won't walk in on him. Most days he fantasizes about Chekov and Sulu, the contrast of their skin as their lean muscles moved together.  
  
“You're sick,” Sam tells Kirk whenever he can catch him alone. “You're the selfish one. You want to fuck Pavel, you want to steal him like you stole Hikaru. Always needing everyone to love you best, Jimmy, and nobody ever does, do they?”  
  
“You're dead,” Kirk finally says one night, not turning from his fish-feeding to give the ghost who's standing behind him the acknowledgment it wants. He's got one foot out the door, Chekov waiting for him by the lifts. “You died first. You lost.”  
  
“You wouldn't say that to your real brother,” the ghost says, furious.  
  
“Exactly,” Kirk says.  
  
That night, after their work outs, Kirk sits on Sulu's bed with Chekov and looks through his old pictures from the first two years of the mission. He jokes about the potential existence of dirty ones and Chekov blushes, grinning.  
  
“You will never see those,” he says, and Kirk laughs it off, though it stings in a way he wasn't anticipating.  
  
“We should message Sulu,” Kirk says later, when they're drinking, the conversation wearing down.  
  
“And say what?” Chekov says, scoffing. “He's been gone for months, and all he sends is coordinates and atmospheric readings. I will not beg him to speak to me.”  
  
“Maybe he just needs a little nudge,” Kirk says. “Maybe he doesn't know where to start with either of us.”  
  
“Good,” Chekov says. He throws back more vodka. “Let him obsess over his precious confusion. I won't trouble him with inquiries.”  
  
“You're pretty hard on him, you know,” Kirk says. “He loves you a lot.”  
  
“Not anymore. I betrayed him by dying, and now I've inconvenienced him by coming back to life.” He mutters something in Russian, squeezing the little vodka cup tightly in his hand.  
  
“These were in the box, you know,” Kirk says, clicking his cup against Chekov's.  
  
“Well,” Chekov says, muttering. “I am in the box, now. I am his keepsake, a little memento of easier days. He wants to neaten my hair and set me on a shelf like a doll.” He glances at Kirk. “You are the one he wants to be with. Is it true that he hasn't messaged you? You would tell me if he had, yes?”  
  
“You know I would,” Kirk says. “Jesus, at this point I feel more loyalty to you than I do to him.”  
  
They study each other for a moment, then look to their empty cups. Chekov pours more for both of them.  
  
“To Sulu, man,” Kirk says, lifting his. “I still want him back every day.”  
  
“Me, too,” Chekov says glumly, toasting. He watches Kirk drink after he's finished his own, his eyebrows arching. Kirk is drunk enough to appreciate how cute he looks, his cheeks pink from drinking, but he's not drunk enough to touch him.  
  
“What made you fall in love with Hikaru?” Chekov asks. “When did it happen? He wouldn't tell me.”  
  
“Probably because you were still foaming at the mouth when you asked – not that foaming at the mouth wasn't warranted. But, uh.” Kirk leans back against the pillows and tries to remember the precise moment he fell in love with Sulu. On the cliff on that away mission, probably, the pollen that was making them slightly more honest than normal blowing over the edge, sticking in their hair.  
  
“I think what made me fall in love with him was hearing about how well he'd loved you,” Kirk says, laughing at himself. “Jealousy, or something. Wanting him to feel that way about me, too. Or instead. I have this. Issue.”  
  
“Issue?” Chekov says. He leans back beside Kirk, looking sleepy.  
  
“Yeah. I, uh. Get competitive in this stupid way. Never mind.”  
  
“So you fell in love with Hikaru because you wanted him to treat you the way he treated me?” Chekov scoffs, his cheek resting against Kirk's shoulder. “He did not treat me very well.”  
  
“Bullshit. God, where were you guys when everyone else was envying how happy you were? All you do is bitch about each other, it's like you forgot what it was like.”  
  
“Hikaru bitched about me?” Chekov asks, turning his face up to Kirk's, and Kirk wants to kiss the little wrinkle between his arched eyebrows.  
  
“No,” Kirk says. “He bitched about himself, about the way he thought you saw him. He thought – well, okay, he had this story – oh, shit, I'm drunk, I shouldn't tell you this.”  
  
“Tell me,” Chekov says, tugging on Kirk's arm. He playing up his cuteness, getting what he wants. Kirk grins at him.  
  
“Alright, well, in Hikaru's first year at the Academy, he had a kind of boyfriend, did he tell you that?”  
  
“No.” Chekov pulls away from Kirk, sitting up on his knees. “ _Bozhe moi_ , but he told you? He had no respect for me, none.”  
  
“Oh, fuck, no, see – that's the whole point of this story. He told me about this because he had no respect for _me_. He didn't give a shit about what I thought of him – don't roll your eyes, it's true. He kept this story from you because he had so much respect for you that he was afraid of what you would think of him if you knew.”  
  
“If I knew that he had a boyfriend?” Chekov says, scoffing. “It was not news to me that he was attracted to men, and why would anybody –”  
  
“Ah, well, there's more to the story than that. This guy – he was pretty into hypo'ing drugs, and Hikaru got into it, too, so he could get closer to the guy. Also, I think they only fucked when they were high? Oh, shit, you can't tell him that I told you this.”  
  
“Tell him, when would I?” Chekov is breathing faster now, distressed. “He does not speak to me, and even when he did, he was – lying to me, keeping things from me.” He moans and leans forward, hiding his face in his hands. “I should have stayed dead,” he says, his voice muffled.  
  
“Jesus, and you said he was dramatic,” Kirk says with a laugh, pulling Chekov to him. It feels like such an easy thing, the obvious thing to do, and he doesn't even realize what he's doing until he's holding Chekov against his side. Chekov gives him an angry pout, and Kirk laughs again, so Chekov punches his chest.  
  
“Ow, damn,” Kirk says, rubbing the spot where Chekov hit him.  
  
“Sorry,” Chekov says, staring up at Kirk with those big eyes. He's pretty clearly asking to be kissed, but Kirk needs to figure out why before he does anything about it.  
  
“Don't fuck with me just to get back at him,” Kirk says. “I like you.”  
  
Chekov lets out a guffaw that makes Kirk jump a little, then hits him again.  
  
“Let me go,” Chekov says, still smiling at Kirk like he wants to be undressed. “You're crazy.”  
  
“I know. But you make me feel less crazy.” Kirk pulls him closer, remembering that he's drunk only when he burps a little at the back of his throat and tastes the heat of the vodka.  
  
“It would be funny if we fucked,” Chekov says seriously, like he's considering a course change on the bridge, running it by his captain. “I have thought of it.”  
  
“Funny? Really? Is that the right word?”  
  
“Yes. Funny to me. I have a dark sense of humor, maybe.”  
  
“You're pretty dark in general, dude.”  
  
Chekov smiles like this is a compliment and tucks his head down against Kirk's shoulder, scooting closer, curling up like he's ready to sleep. Kirk snorts with laughter and draws his fingers through Chekov's curls. They're softer than they look.  
  
“What would Hikaru think of me stealing his boyfriend?” Chekov says, his fingers moving idly over Kirk's chest.  
  
“My thoughts exactly.”  
  
They don't have sex, much too drunk for that, and don't even kiss. Chekov rolls over, pulling Kirk with him, holding Kirk's arm against his chest and snuggling up around it. He feels pixie-sized in Kirk's arms, and Kirk curls his legs up behind Chekov's, trying to ignore the whiff of Sulu that he gets from the sheets as he buries his nose in Chekov's hair. He'll pretend this has nothing to do with Sulu for as long as he can, as if hiding inside the Chekov box is a some kind of revolution against Sulu's hold on both of them. All he knows tonight is that Chekov keeps the ghost away, and fits so well against him that he's starting to wonder if the two of them aren't just two pieces of Sulu's accessory set, little plastic parts that were designed to snap easily into his palms.


	10. Chapter 10

When Kirk wakes up, he's feeling less charitable where Sulu is concerned, ready to blame him for the drowsy confusion that surges into panic as he sits up on his elbow, his hangover lurching into action at the back of his head. Then Chekov rolls over beside him, moaning and rubbing at his lidded eyes, and Kirk feels that calm wash over him, the thing that Chekov gives him when he's not looking at Kirk like he ruined his life. Chekov sighs as if to ask Kirk if he can believe this, and Kirk shakes his head.  
  
“It's not true what I said,” Chekov says, heavily accented and bizarrely mature-sounding, as if he's about to impart ancient Russian wisdom. “When I was mad with you, outside the gym. I told you that I was surprised that it was you, but it wasn't. You would have been my first guess.”  
  
“Why?” Kirk asks, catching on slow. He doesn't want to hear that Sulu loved him all along, because he knows it would be a lie, Chekov's delusion, but also because he doesn't want his understanding of Sulu altered that way, wants to keep believing that Sulu loved Chekov the way that Kirk is beginning to, only better, harder.  
  
“Because,” Chekov says. “You caught him.”  
  
“Yeah, but so did you,” Kirk says, knowing immediately what Chekov is referring to, the smell of Vulcan's fast death coming back to him sharply at the mention of the drill.  
  
“Precisely,” Chekov says.  
  
They get up and get dressed, wetting Sulu's comb and trying to tame their hair with it, elbows bumping at the sink in the en-suite bathroom, and Kirk isn't going to kiss him, but then, at the door, he does. Chekov is into it for a moment, his tongue shorter and rounder than Sulu's, probing timidly against Kirk's, then he pulls back with a tired moan. His hands are laced behind Kirk's neck as he stares up at him with a chastising look.  
  
“Maybe we should just have very filthy sex,” Chekov says. “No kissing or sharing a bed.”  
  
“Tried that with Sulu. Didn't work.”  
  
Chekov rolls his eyes as if to say he's not surprised that the two of them messed up what should have been a neater arrangement. He fingers a piece of hair at the back of Kirk's neck, twirling it.  
  
“That moment when I saved the two of you was the best feeling I've ever had,” Chekov says. “And then, so fast, the worst feeling replaced it.”  
  
“If you want me to leave you alone, I will,” Kirk says. “I'm aware that this is probably the worst idea I've ever had.”  
  
“It was my idea,” Chekov says, petulant, standing up a little straighter. “And I cannot – what about this ghost? It could be a malevolent species that has come aboard the ship to attack our captain. It could eat you in your sleep if I am not there to fight it away.”  
  
“That's – look, seriously, I shouldn't have said anything about the fucking – ghost. My nervous breakdown is not your problem.”  
  
“Yes, it is. You are Hikaru's – possession, and I should be looking after you.” He glances at the plants, which have mostly recovered under Kirk's care, and puts his cheek against Kirk's shoulder.  
  
“So you'll fuck me as a favor to Hikaru,” Kirk says. “I'm sure he'll appreciate that.”  
  
“You're so mean,” Chekov says absently, still staring at the plants.  
  
“Funny you should say that – in my letter that Hikaru never bothered to answer, I wrote this big rambling paragraph about how mean you are and how I forgive you for it. Though I don't, really, I just wanted him to think so, you know, to win some maturity points.”  
  
Chekov smiles, still looking sad. “My letter was mostly about you,” he says.  
  
“Huh. So, that. Probably freaked him out.”  
  
“He still should have written back. At least to me.” Chekov tips his head back, and Kirk wants to kiss him again. He licks his lips to recapture the taste of Chekov's.  
  
“So why'd you fall in love with him?” Kirk says. “If I have to answer that, you should, too.”  
  
“Ah, because –” Chekov winces and rubs at his forehead with the heel of his hand, something Kirk has seen him do before when he's confronted with a difficult equation, one of the things he's come to look forward to since he started inventorying Chekov's gestures.  
  
“Because he's brave in a way that he doesn't understand, so he does stupid things like volunteering to fence Romulans and scout through the Grotliun system, trying to prove that he's brave in another way. He'll never understand that there is no difference between one type of courage and another, and that's why I love him.”  
  
Kirk smiles slowly. “Oh, is that all?”  
  
“No,” Chekov says. He steps back and straightens his shirt. “He's also extremely attractive and good in bed. Oh.” Chekov's shoulders drop, the smugness draining from his face. “I want him back.”  
  
“I know. You'll get him, don't worry.”  
  
“No, I won't. And if I did, what would happen to you?”  
  
“Oh, I don't know,” Kirk says. He punches the door's control panel before this conversation can become more irreversible. “I'd probably go nuts for good, and then at least I'd have my hallucinations of the two of you to keep me company.”  
  
Chekov mutters something in Russian as they head out of the room, and Kirk laughs, understanding well enough. They're all fucked, but Kirk can't bring himself to feel doomed, probably because he's falling in love again, and again with the one person he should be avoiding on a restraining-order level. It's addictive, this feeling, and Kirk would bottle it if he could. He gives Chekov secret looks on the way to the bridge, laughing when Chekov narrows his eyes as if to tell him to shut up, to stop gloating.  
  
During his shift, he tries to talk himself out of this kamikaze course of action, pushing away fantasies about how things could be when he goes back to Sulu's room with Chekov: the way that pale skin would give under Kirk's fingers, the way Chekov's wrists would look as they were pinned to Sulu's bed, his hands curling into fists, his moans edged with protest, dissolving into begging. At one point Kirk has to actually slap himself, and he does so as subtly as he can, but Uhura still turns from her station to give him a puzzled look.  
  
He leaves the bridge before Chekov, hoping that some distance between them will help him clear his will of this destructive firepower. Bones is busy in sick bay, arguing with a yeoman who thinks he's space pregnant but is actually just overworked and gaining weight, and Kirk waits in Bones' office, half-listening to Bones' ranting and the poor yeoman's crying. By the time Bones storms into his office he's muttering to himself, and he ignores Kirk, going straight for the whiskey.  
  
“Oh, good, I'm not the only one who's losing his mind,” Kirk says as Bones gulps the whiskey down and pours more.  
  
“I'm not losing my fucking mind!” Bones barks, so loudly that Kirk jumps backward, thinking of his childhood cat when it would be suddenly startled by the roar of his mother's hairdryer.  
  
“I'm just sick of these self-diagnosing, cabin fever morons,” Bones says. “This is the really _fun_ part of the mission for your CMO: the last year, the most dangerous galaxy, and they're all starting to climb the fucking walls, pulling their hair out because so and so from engineering told them a horror story about men getting space pregnant and giving birth to tentacle monsters.”  
  
“Um, if you'd let me finish,” Kirk says, pouring some whiskey for himself. “I was referring to the hypochondriac out there, not you.”  
  
“We need a shore leave,” Bones says. “This crew is running ragged – and I'm not talking about myself, I'm fucking fine! – but there's got to be something, Jim, some marginally not-treacherous moon where we could stop for a few days, let these kids breathe some fresh artificial air.”  
  
“No way,” Kirk says. “The schedule's gotten too tight, and I'm not leaving that scouting team out there to drift for three days while the alpha crew kicks back at some moon hotel.”  
  
“The scouting team,” Bones says, rolling his eyes. “The Sulu team, you mean.”  
  
“Hey! Don't accuse me of fucking playing favorites. You know I'd do anything for any of these –”  
  
“Alright, alright, I know,” Bones says, waving off his tantrum. “Now what's this about losing your mind?”  
  
“Forget it,” Kirk says, slamming down his glass. “Like you said – it's just cabin fever, and stress about this last leg. I'm fine.”  
  
“Jim, c'mon, sit down for a minute, put your feet up. Figuratively, though, I don't want your boots on my desk.”  
  
“That's alright,” Kirk says, wanting to get back to Chekov, to see how this is going to play out. It's not as if he can actually articulate the question he came to ask Bones, or as if he doesn't know how Bones would respond. _Hey, Bonesy: fuck Chekov, yes or no?_ It's not like Bones would understand. Even Sulu wouldn't, but Chekov seems to, and Kirk feels antsy for the sight of him already.  
  
“How're things going with the teenager?” Kirk asks, lingering in the doorway, looking for encouragement that Bones won't know he's offering.  
  
“She's twenty-one now, asshole,” Bones says. “And she's good. Are you – how are you?”  
  
Kirk laughs. “I'm okay.”  
  
“Taking care of Chekov?” Bones says, not a hint of suspicion in it, because not even Bones is cynical enough to imagine that those words would send an anticipatory shiver down Kirk's spine.  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“That's good. Good of you to do that. Sulu would want you to.”  
  
“Uh-huh. Well, I gotta go. Speaking of Chekov. Or – Sulu, I mean. Uh, gotta water the plants.”  
  
Kirk hurries away, feeling progressively slimier as he moves through the halls. Everyone he passes gives him the sympathetic smile they've offered since Chekov returned, because as far as they know, Kirk is setting aside his own needs in favor of those of his crew.  
  
He tries to convince himself that this is exactly what he's doing when he comes through the door of Sulu's room and Chekov springs up from the bed. He's still in his uniform, his hands twitching at his sides, face pink.  
  
“Just fucking,” Chekov says when Kirk stands in front of him, waiting for a cue beyond Chekov's dark pink lips and fat pupils. “Nothing else.”  
  
“Right,” Kirk says, and the first thing he does is pick Chekov up off the floor, slam him back against the bedroom wall and kiss his wet, gasping mouth. Chekov moans and kisses him back, already hard against the flat of Kirk's stomach, his ass wiggling as Kirk kneads it with both hands.  
  
“Fuck me like you fucked Hikaru,” Chekov says, and his eyes are dark, jaw tight, but the line still feels rehearsed. Kirk spins around and drops him onto the bed.  
  
“No,” Kirk says, yanking Chekov's shirt up until it's bundled around his wrists. Chekov pants and stares up at Kirk as he uses the sleeves of Chekov's shirt to tie his hands together. Chekov looks stunned but interested, and his cock is dribbling precome onto his stomach when Kirk pulls his uniform trousers and briefs down in one rough motion. Kirk grabs Chekov's bound arms and hauls him up, using his other hand to tear open the front of his pants.  
  
“You're not a delicate little flower, are you?” Kirk says as he shoves his underwear down, letting his heavy cock flop out. He moves forward on his knees, angling it toward Chekov's gaping mouth.  
  
“Not a – flower, no,” Chekov says, still looking astonished. His eyes drop down to the head of Kirk's cock, and when he licks his fat little lips Kirk has to bite back a groan.  
  
“I'm not gonna fuck you like he did,” Kirk says. “Not like you belong on that shelf over there with his other pretty little flowers. You're not my pretty little thing, you're his. You know what you are to me, Ensign?”  
  
“W-what, sir?” Chekov asks, and if he starts drooling Kirk won't be surprised. He wants that cock in his mouth; he's twitching toward it, fat drops of precome streaking down his own hard prick.  
  
“You're my cabin boy,” Kirk says, grinning and fisting Chekov's curls. He's trembling, and Kirk can see the rounded end of that little tongue, wants to suck it into his mouth, stroke it with his fingers, feel it on his cock.  
  
“Serve your captain, Ensign,” Kirk says, letting the head of his cock rest on Chekov's bottom lip, weighing it down slightly. “Show him what you came to Starfleet to do, how much you respect his rank.”  
  
Chekov moans and laps at Kirk, his eyes fluttering shut as he tastes him. Kirk gives Chekov's hair a tug and his mouth opens for Kirk's cock, straining around him as he pushes inside, that little mouth making Kirk's width look impossible in comparison. Chekov is undaunted, eager as he breathes through his nose and slides forward, trying to take more.  
  
“That's good,” Kirk says, and it fucking is – he's never had his dick sucked by someone who's gotten so soaking wet for him. He pets Chekov's hair, moaning as he feels the tightness at the back of Chekov's throat around the head of his cock. “Overachiever,” he says softly, and Chekov huffs a little, his head beginning to bob.  
  
Kirk floats while Chekov sucks him, breathing underwater. He watches the way Chekov's shoulders move as he trembles with the effort of staying up right, hands still bound and Kirk's fist in his curls his only means of balance. Everything about him feels a little sacred and otherworldly, the heat of his mouth so different from Sulu's, _softer_ somehow, like silk.  
  
“God, that's good,” Kirk moans as he pulls Chekov back. Chekov stares up at him, his mouth red and wet as he waits for his next command. Kirk grins and strokes one flushed cheek with his thumb.  
  
“Hands and knees,” he says, and Chekov scrambles into position, presenting his ass in a particularly brazen fashion, the curve of his spine fucking unbelievable as he folds himself in half, offering his back end to Kirk. His hands are trapped under his chest, and Kirk reaches around to untie them, then pulls them back to bind them more tightly, behind Chekov's back.  
  
“Your captain needs to fuck you now,” Kirk says as he ransacks the drawer beside Sulu's bed, finding the lube easily. “You okay with that?”  
  
“Yes, sir,” Chekov breathes out, his cheek pressed to the mattress. His knees inch apart on the bed until his legs are spread as widely as the trousers that are pooled at his knees will allow.  
  
“S'only right that the captain gets the prettiest boy on the ship for his cabin, huh?” Kirk says, teasing his thumb over Chekov's perineum while he fingers him open. Chekov is whimpering needfully, his hole clutching around Kirk's fingers, back trembling. He's insanely tight, and Kirk starts to believe what he's saying as his cock throbs in anticipation: he deserves this tight little body, the whimpers he's drawing from Chekov's lips, and the way Chekov looked at him when he realized that Kirk was in control here: with naked, embarrassed gratitude.  
  
Chekov's whimpers fall away when Kirk pushes into him, giving way to sharp, panted breaths. Kirk stays quiet, his breathing carefully measured as he tries to keep up the pretense of control. He's actually more out of control than he's ever been in his life, but Chekov's body is so fucking welcoming, tight but greedy, even when he hisses in pain and has to take a moment to adjust.  
  
“And the prettiest cabin boy gets to be fucked by the biggest cock on the ship,” Kirk says, rubbing Chekov's back while he tries to relax around Kirk's width. “It's only fair.”  
  
Chekov curses in Russian, his fists curling up tightly against the small of his back, knuckles going white. He lets out his breath after this outburst, and Kirk can feel him giving in to the feeling of being stretched to capacity, allowing Kirk to slide all the way in, until his balls are pushed between Chekov's ass cheeks.  
  
“Like that?” Kirk asks, barely able to speak for how good Chekov feels. He leans down over Chekov's back, which is sheened with a fine layer of sweat, and he fits over Chekov perfectly, covering him without even needing to press his chest to Chekov's back.  
  
“Like having your captain stuffed deep in you?” Kirk asks, nipping at the back of Chekov's ear. Chekov nods, seeming as far gone as Kirk feels, his mouth slack and his hole still squeezing around Kirk timidly, as if he can't believe how much he can take.  
  
“Proud of yourself for handling that cock, slut?” Kirk asks, and Chekov's mouth quirks into a smile, like he's impressed with Kirk, too.  
  
“Yes, sir,” he says, breathy and small, his face going serious.  
  
“Well, you're not done yet, Ensign,” Kirk says, tempted to call him _cadet_ the way one of of Kirk's professors did when Kirk fucked him over his desk at the Academy. “Think you can still take this cock when it's pounding you open?”  
  
“Y-yes, sir – want to try, sir.”  
  
“You want your captain to train your ass? Train you to take a real, brutal fucking? That it?”  
  
“Uh, _yess_ , sir, yes!”  
  
Kirk groans and leans back, his hands sliding down Chekov's sides as he does, drawing a shudder from him. He luxuriates in the feeling of Chekov's skin for a moment, feels it growing increasingly slick. When he lets himself look down at Chekov's hole and sees how widely it's stretched around him he's afraid he'll come just from the sight, so he shuts his eyes as he begins to thrust in.  
  
He gets in only five thrusts, Chekov screaming through each one, before he has to change positions or unload. He doesn't want this to end, both because it's fucking incredible and because he's afraid of what will happen when it does, so he slides out, and smacks Chekov's ass when he whines in protest.  
  
“Lesson one about being the captain's cabin boy,” Kirk says when Chekov squirms, trying to look back at him. “I'm a busy man, and I won't always have time to give you what you need. But we can compromise, see?” Kirk reaches over the side of the bed, into his discarded trousers, and finds his PADD. Chekov slumps over onto his side, panting, watching with interest as Kirk stretches out onto his back, his cock engorged almost to the point of release, dark between his legs. He tucks one arm behind his head and holds his PADD over his face, pretending to read through recent messages, unable to actually focus on a single word.  
  
“Captain?” Chekov says weakly, making his eyes soft as he begs. “I – I –”  
  
“You want my cock back?” Kirk asks, spreading his legs. Chekov moans, nodding. “Well, that's fine, Ensign, go ahead and mount up. I'm a giving kind of guy. You can ride me while I read my mail.”  
  
Chekov whines, but Kirk ignores him, bringing the PADD back to his face. He watches from around it as Chekov struggles up onto his knees and crawls slowly forward, trying to kick his pants off. When he finally succeeds, after much adorable frustration, he gets up onto his trembling legs and shyly, cautiously, squats over Kirk's cock, his hands still tied behind his back and his toes curling inside his regulation socks as he rubs his hole over the head.  
  
“Go on,” Kirk says, still staring at the PADD, where he's opened the camera feature so he can watch Chekov while pretending to ignore him. It occurs to him that he could take a picture and send it Sulu, but he's not that far gone, and he wants Chekov to trust him after this, not hate him. He's not sure what he wants from Sulu anymore. It would be hard to argue that what he wants isn't hateful resentment, considering what he's doing.  
  
“Ai!” Chekov says as he lowers himself onto Kirk's dick, throwing his head back. Kirk has had maybe a hundred partners in his life, and he's never heard anyone make that noise during sex. He loves it, wants to grab Chekov's hips and slam up into him in response, but keeps staring as impassively as he can at his PADD, where he's turned on the zoom, the lens focused on Chekov's trembling flanks as they part around Kirk's cock. Kirk doesn't make a sound, just listens to Chekov's _ah_ s and _oh_ s while he lowers himself. When he's fully seated he groans with a kind of accomplished relief, staring at Kirk, looking like a ruined angel on the screen of the PADD.  
  
“Fuck yourself, Ensign,” Kirk says, still not looking at him – not directly, anyway. Chekov sighs with exhaustion, lifting himself up on his shaking legs and then falling back down onto Kirk's cock, groaning. His ass is squeezing around Kirk, grasping, begging to be fucked harder than he can manage with his own bound, tired body. Kirk will give it to him, but not yet. He lets Chekov tire himself further, moaning and trying to move faster, sweat dripping from the ends of his curls now.  
  
“All done,” Kirk says, when he can't fight the urge to slam into Chekov anymore, his little sobs of effort too much to bear. Chekov stops moving, just pants as Kirk tosses his PADD aside and sits up on his elbows, enjoying the view for a few more seconds. Chekov is desperately impaled, shaking all over, sweat coursing down the center of his heaving chest. Kirk gives his hips one upward snap, grinning when Chekov screams and arches, his head falling back, eyes pinched shut.  
  
“My cabin boy's such a fast learner,” Kirk says, reaching down to rub his thumb over the head of Chekov's cock, which is soaked with precome. Chekov moans and writhes on him weakly, trying to fuck his hand. Kirk can't wait anymore; he's going to explode, they both are, the humidity between their bodies reaching jungle-like proportions.  
  
What follows is the best, sweatiest, most mindless fucking Kirk has ever known. He pushes Chekov down onto his back and watches his face glow with relief as he feels the drag of the first thrust, then pinch up in agony when Kirk slams back in. They're both panting, biting at each other's lips until Kirk sits back to give it to him really hard, his hips working like an unownable force of nature, Chekov wailing and limp beneath him as Kirk fucks him hard enough to make Sulu's mattress jump on the frame. He holds Chekov against him when he comes, moaning with pulsing relief as his hands clamp around Chekov's thighs, making him take it all.  
  
Chekov sobs and quivers in his grip, and Kirk realizes that he's still hard as he falls down against him, Chekov's cock jutting into Kirk's stomach. Kirk knows Chekov would come would with only a few clumsy squeezes, but he pulls out and swallows Chekov to the hilt anyway, as a sort of reward. Chekov screams in surprise but wastes no time before fucking Kirk's mouth, his tired hips working as hard as they can. When he unloads he moans like a defeated, used-up little thing, and Kirk swallows it all, too far gone to even taste it.  
  
He crawls up to hide Chekov's body with his, both of them still fighting for breath while Kirk unties Chekov's hands. Chekov tucks his arms to his chest when they're freed, and Kirk tucks Chekov to his, wondering if Chekov would fight free if he had any energy left at all. As it is, Chekov just lies limp in Kirk's arms, panting his humid breath against Kirk's chest.  
  
Kirk sleeps deeply for the first time since Chekov came back from the dead. He doesn't know where he is, doesn't dream, but when he wakes he knows that he's not alone, and is glad for this. Chekov is still asleep, dead weight against Kirk's chest. Kirk kisses Chekov's curls, which are still damp and fragrant with the sex-drenched scent of his sweat. He brushes his fingers down over Chekov's shoulder and then up along his neck, drawing a shudder and a sleepy whine from him.  
  
They're like crash victims when they finally rouse, Kirk after another good, long nap and Chekov just now blinking out of his post-sex daze. Kirk brings Chekov water, and resists the urge to pull him into an hour-long shower, instead running a cool, damp cloth over his skin while he drinks. Chekov is still flushed, but it's more of a glow now, less of a burn. He's sniffling a little, hazy and weak, but he doesn't fight Kirk's hints of affection when he offers them, and accepts one of the sandwiches that Kirk gets from the replicator. They eat on the bed, crossed legged and facing each other, still naked, knees touching.  
  
“Bones thinks the crew needs a shore leave,” Kirk says when the quiet edges from comfortable into awkward. Chekov looks up from his sandwich, chewing thoughtfully, chipmunk-like with his cheeks full of food.  
  
“That's ridiculous,” Chekov says, his mouth still mostly full. “Doesn't he know where we are?”  
  
“That's what I said,” Kirk says. He smiles, and Chekov shrugs.  
  
“You're only the second person I've ever done that with,” Chekov says. Kirk's guilt dances out onto stage with a fanfare, popping out from behind the curtains.  
  
“He tied you up and everything?” Kirk says.  
  
“No. I meant just – sex, any sex. I wanted him to do things like this. He wouldn't.”  
  
“That's weird. I never did anything particularly creative with him, either. He has some sex hang ups, I think.”  
  
“Mhmm, yes,” Chekov says. “It's too important to him, like some kind of sacred ritual. I don't feel this way about it.”  
  
“Me either.”  
  
When they've finished eating, Kirk reads his PADD messages, and Chekov puts his head on Kirk's thigh, dozing while Kirk scratches his fingers through his curls. Kirk still can't really concentrate on what he's reading, and he knows Chekov isn't really sleeping, just thinking about Sulu.  
  
“What was it like between the two of you?” Chekov finally says. “I wonder – I've thought of it. Often. Tried to picture.”  
  
“Yeah, I don't know,” Kirk says, not wanting to think about how it was with Sulu, how he felt like he'd come home to a warmth that had always been waiting for him. “I try to picture it with you two, too.”  
  
“Maybe that's why we did this,” Chekov says, and Kirk can hear the tremor of guilt in his voice.  
  
“Probably.”  
  
“I still miss him,” Chekov says. He sits up and looks at Kirk, frowning a little, daring him to doubt this. “I – you were only teasing me, I know, but I liked the way he treated me. He would look at me like he was afraid I would disappear, like a boy in a fairy tale who has found some enchanted thing. You don't look at me like that,” he says, and Kirk tries to hear some accusation in it, but Chekov just looks like he's working out a calculation, trying to figure out how he could enjoy one and then the other.  
  
“He'll look at you like that again,” Kirk says. “When he comes back. Trust me. Don't worry.”  
  
“But what if he also looks at you the way he did before he left?”  
  
“Like how?” Kirk asks. He puts his PADD aside, wanting Sulu with him, his chin on Kirk's shoulder, his hand soothing through Chekov's sex-wrecked hair.  
  
“Like he was the only one who could see you,” Chekov says. “And like he was glad for this, because he didn't want anyone else looking. He seemed so – worried about you. I guess because of me.”  
  
“He was just worried that I'd tell you what happened while you were gone,” Kirk says with a laugh. He draws Chekov to him, reveling in the give of his tired body, the soft heat of his mouth as he presses his face to Kirk's chest. He's going to be obsessed with Chekov's mouth now, won't ever hear that accent without looking down at his lips and remembering how they parted for his cock.  
  
“Do you really feel these things, or do you only say them to try to fool me?” Chekov asks.  
  
“Huh? What things?”  
  
“Things to suggest that Hikaru does not love you.”  
  
“He doesn't, Pavel. He almost said it out loud once, remember? Barely caught himself.”  
  
Chekov moans irritably, muttering something in Russian. He tucks his arm across Kirk's chest and shuts his eyes. They both have alpha shift in three hours, and Kirk wants to go to the bridge without showering, freshly baptized by Chekov's sweat, his come still a bitter taste at the back of Kirk's throat.  
  
“Hikaru does not have sex with people unless he loves them,” Chekov says.  
  
“Sure he does,” Kirk says. “The guy with the drugs. He just never told you about that.”  
  
“He never told me because he was embarrassed that he _could_ love someone like that!” Chekov says, punching Kirk's shoulder. “Someone who would hurt him.”  
  
This quiets both of them, and Kirk flips the data screen on so that they'll have some white noise to accompany their private thoughts about Sulu. Kirk imagines what's going on in their heads is pretty similar: they're both picturing Sulu on that shuttle, bathed in the ugly light of the cockpit, lonely and cranky and constantly in danger of being blown into space dust. Kirk is still confident that it won't happen, that Sulu will come back to the _Enterprise_ , but he can no longer envision what will happen when he does. It sits in his mind like a child's first conception of the apocalypse, the kind of thing a kid imagines when he first learns that the world could end: fire, bright lights, and an aftermath that must involve his own survival, somehow.  
  
*  
  
Months pass, and Sulu's reports become interchangeable: a minefield here, a transmission from a moon colony there, everything successfully navigated. Kirk goes on several away missions that go as well as anything in the Grotliun galaxy can: tense confrontations with settlers and natives, injuries to crew but nobody lost for good. Chekov begs to join him, but he's got nothing but the basic Academy combat training and Kirk won't let him near an away mission until it involves more navigating and physics genius calculations and less getting blindsided by rock-throwing locals. Chekov is in a bad mood about this, but he comes to see Kirk in sick bay when he returns with a dislocated shoulder and a bad gash across his forehead.  
  
“Bite down,” Bones says, stuffing a soft roll of bandages into Kirk's mouth before taking hold of his arm. Kirk knows the routine, has done this before, and is kind of stupidly glad that Chekov is here to witness it, his arms folded over his chest as he tries not to look worried. Kirk screams into the gag when Bones snaps his shoulder back into place, forgetting to play it cool.  
  
“There,” Bones says, patting Kirk's shoulder as he rolls it, testing the range of motion. It's perfect: good, old-fashioned Bones-style medicine. Kirk smiles up at Bones, who is cleaning the cut on his forehead now.  
  
“I could have helped,” Chekov says, coming to Kirk's side and tapping one finger against the back of his hand. When Kirk is cleaned up, he'll take Chekov back to Sulu's room and fuck him over the side of the bed, taunt him for being a cabin boy, but outside of sex games he's got to throw Chekov a bone.  
  
“Probably,” Kirk says. “Next time, okay?”  
  
Chekov scowls but lingers, his hand sliding over Kirk's when Bones goes to get whatever he needs to keep Kirk's head wound from maturing into an ugly scar.  
  
“You should teach me, if you're so worried about my combat skills,” Chekov says. “Hikaru was trying to teach me fencing, but that's – too obtuse. You taught a combat class at the Academy, yes?”  
  
“Yeah.” It was probably the best time Kirk had while he was there, working up massive stores of adrenaline, the men and women in the class all looking to him to make them stronger, letting him pin them in demonstration. By the end of the semester he'd fucked half the class, and the sex was pretty incredible, almost always taking place directly after a lesson, frantic and sweaty and loud.  
  
The following night, he goes to the gym with Chekov as usual, but instead of separating, Kirk headed for the weights and Chekov for the track, they go to the mats together. The gym is as gaping and empty as it always is when they're in it, but they quickly fill the space with their shouts and grunts, Chekov laughing at himself when he gets something wrong, pretending that it doesn't trouble him greatly to be outmatched at anything and coming at Kirk twice as strong on the second try. Kirk is out of practice when it comes to teaching, and the end of the lesson devolves into the two of them laughing as they wrestle freestyle on the mats.  
  
“Stupid – cheating, this is cheating!” Chekov complains when he's pinned, and he's so sincere that Kirk laughs hard enough to choke on his breath, lowering his mouth over Chekov's when he devolves into Russian curses. Chekov moans in complaint but lets himself be kissed, his cock stirring under the weight of Kirk's hips.  
  
They start practicing advanced combat every night, and almost every night it ends in sex, Chekov flattened to the mats, panting and frustrated, letting Kirk wear him down until the fight drains from him and he gives in, only writhing weakly while Kirk fucks him. It becomes Kirk's favorite way to fuck: Chekov's little running shorts still looped around one of his ankles, his sweat-soaked shirt rucked up over his nipples, and the way Chekov finally lets himself be conquered, his arms winding around Kirk's neck and his mouth opening for his tongue. When they're through Chekov will yawn and scrabble at his face with his fist, sated and sleepy, kittenish. Kirk will nuzzle at him, enjoying the reprieve for as long as he can, until Chekov cracks his eyes open and makes Kirk admit that he's getting better, stronger and smarter with a weapon. It's true, and Kirk is proud of him. They start sleeping in Kirk's quarters, which don't seem to be haunted anymore, and he likes waking up to Chekov, who always has a hard time rousing for his shift, moaning with annoyance when Kirk gives up and dumps him over his shoulder, carrying him to the shower.  
  
People start to notice all the time they're spending together, and they eventually stop marveling at Kirk and Chekov's maturity and start wondering what the hell is going on. Kirk ducks Bones' pointed gazes, but even he hasn't had the nerve to actually ask about anything specific yet. At the end of the day, Kirk is glad to escape the stares of the others and disappear into his quarters with Chekov, where they both go right for their PADDs, pretending that they're not checking for messages from Sulu. All they get are the reports: _Scouted what are known as Yart's Outer Regions this morning, found several antiquated satellites which we left adrift for fear that they would again be rigged with explosives. Lieutenant Vale's hand is healing well after the last attack of that nature, thanks to the preprepared grafts. Food and supply stores remain adequate and should not need replenishing in the last month of our scouting shift_.  
  
Sulu seems so surrendered to the job, so otherwise blank, that Kirk won't be surprised if he volunteers for the second shift as well. Kirk will refuse. He's learned his lesson; Chekov was right. Sulu was bluffing, and Kirk didn't catch that, was willing to let him risk his life. He failed that test, and Sulu has shut down. Kirk just doesn't understand why he's shut Chekov out, too. He still looks at Chekov's received messages periodically, but never sees anything from Sulu, and feels twice as guilty about checking now.  
  
They talk about Sulu often, asking each other questions like they're performing some complex experiment with Sulu as the control, their varying reactions to and experiences with him part of some study that they should be taking notes on. Chekov listens with interest to Kirk's stories about the past two years: the day at the beach, the random fistfights, the binge and the detox, the contents of the Chekov box. Kirk is just as interested when Chekov talks about his two years with Sulu, pre-death.  
  
“He would get so jealous, because he thought he loved me more than I loved him,” Chekov says one night when they're lying in bed together, after the gym, where they fucked on the mats, Chekov fighting off Kirk's attempts to overpower him more successfully than he did even a week ago, and then again in the shower, Chekov giving in easily, flattening his hands against the tile and pushing his ass out for Kirk's tongue.  
  
“He was even jealous of you,” Chekov says, squirming closer, his forehead resting against Kirk's. “He thought I admired you more than him.”  
  
“He said that?” Kirk says with a snort, disbelieving.  
  
“Not out loud,” Chekov says. “But I could tell. He was always asking, did I think you were showing off, did I think you had been too forceful during a negotiation that I wasn't even present for, and did I think anyone remembered that he'd saved you first on the drill – did I think you'd even told anyone that he had, outside of the official report?” Chekov grins. “He was kind of fixated you, really.”  
  
“Damn,” Kirk says. “When you put it that way, I can't believe he ever let me fuck him.”  
  
“I can,” Chekov says, his eyes darkening. “That's how Hikaru is. He'll fight away the things he wants if he thinks he shouldn't want them. He even did it with me, at first, but I would not put up with that nonsense for long.”  
  
“Yeah, but – he didn't want to get fucked by me before you died,” Kirk says. “He was – all he did after you were gone was rant about how perfect you were and how happy you made him.”  
  
“See, and that was his issue with me as well!” Chekov says, pointing a finger at Kirk's nose. “I was too high in his mind, I don't know why, but he couldn't – trust himself to me, I don't think. Not the way he could with you.”  
  
“Let's write a book,” Kirk says, rolling Chekov onto his back and leaning up over him. “How Not to Satisfy Hikaru Sulu, by Pavel Chekov and Jim Kirk.”  
  
Chekov laughs, but Kirk gets the feeling that he doesn't really think it's that funny.  
  
As Sulu's schedule return draws closer, their sex games get weirder, more elaborate and requiring more props, even costumes. Chekov is more enthusiastic about this than Kirk, who enjoys it but doesn't really see the need for this level of creativity. Chekov will present him with complicated things he either got from the replicator or invented in his spare time, stimulators and inhibitors, or some combination of the two. Chekov performs thorough demonstrations and makes all the rules, selects the safe words, and clips on his own collars, then orders Kirk to take control. Kirk kind of wishes Sulu was around to laugh about this with him, at the adorable irony of Chekov in general, though he doubts Sulu would be amused.  
  
Chekov's improvement in the combat arena is making Kirk nervous, because soon he'll have no real excuse to keep Chekov on the ship when he goes on away missions. He's gotten especially good at disarming Kirk, which is annoying, but he's still incapable of ending a session without getting pinned, spitting with fury at the fact that he'll never be stronger than Kirk, whose skills have been sharpened by their training sessions, too.  
  
“Are you still keeping your dream journal?” Kirk asks Chekov one night when they're both close to sleep, Chekov spooned back against Kirk's chest and fidgeting, getting comfortable.  
  
“Yes,” Chekov says, stiffening a little. “But it doesn't work as well as it used to. I have more – nightmares and things, now.”  
  
As if Kirk needs to be told. He misses Sulu's soft whimpers, and being able to comfort him easily with a hand on his hip or a kiss pressed to the back of his neck. Chekov is dangerous when he's having a bad dream, swinging his fists and cursing in wild Russian, sometimes evading Kirk's grip until he tumbles completely out of the bed. Kirk gets the feeling that Sulu would be better at calming him down, that he would have the right words, things that would reach Chekov even through his delirium.  
  
“So what are you trying to dream about?” Kirk asks. He squeezes Chekov closer, thinking about how quickly he'll flee when Sulu returns. They both know what he wants to dream about: that PADD lighting up with a thousand undelivered messages from Sulu, all of them suddenly released from the queue they were stuck in, begging Chekov to respond.  
  
“Stupid,” Chekov says, reaching back to palm Kirk's cheek. “Don't you know?”  
  
“Obviously not.”  
  
“I'm trying to dream that I could keep you both.” Chekov turns around in Kirk's arms, staring at him in the soft blue light, making Kirk think of all the nights that he and Sulu had pillow talk by the light of the aquarium.  
  
“Why would you want to keep me?” Kirk asks, and Chekov frowns, pinching him under the blankets.  
  
“You are worse than Hikaru,” Chekov says. “I can only imagine the two of you together – I'm surprised you didn't open a black hole as soon as your insecurity touched his.”  
  
“Me? You're the one who thinks Sulu was pining after my irrelevant ass while you were together. That's bullshit, Pavel, and I wish you could get outside of your own fucking over-analytical crap enough to see it.”  
  
“Ugh, shut up,” Chekov says with a sigh, putting his finger over Kirk's lips. “I think I've finally gotten tired of talking about Hikaru.”  
  
“That's interesting, because he's going to be back on the ship in four days.”  
  
Chekov eyes fill with unfiltered fear, and Kirk knows this isn't news to him, that he just hasn't heard it out loud before now. He leans forward to kiss Chekov between his eyes.  
  
“It is a good thing we have been practicing combat,” Chekov says. “Because Hikaru will try to kill us both when he gets back and – finds out.”  
  
“He doesn't have to find out,” Kirk says. “I don't want him to – it'd hurt him too much. No, you just – go back to him, forget this happened.”  
  
“Forget, ah, because it was so easy for Hikaru to forget you when he had me back.”  
  
Chekov actually curls a little closer as he says this, and Kirk wants to fight the calm that grows at the pit of his stomach when he thinks that Chekov might really care about him and want to keep him. It's absurd, and Chekov is maybe the least self-aware person Kirk has ever known, despite his talent for diagnosing the problems of those around him. He doesn't understand that he's just doing this out of spite, or for attention, or for any reason other than real feelings for Kirk, because it all grew out of Sulu's decision to leave, and love doesn't work that way, despite the fact that it happened that way for Kirk. He loves Chekov so much that every drop kick that floors him in the gym feels like something he did, too, and he'll laugh and open his arms, reeling with joy when Chekov drops into them and humps him triumphantly.  
  
The last days before Sulu's return pass quickly, and Kirk tries to stay away from Chekov as much as he can, to ease the transition. Chekov won't be avoided, and at one point actually hacks into the conference room where Kirk is staring listlessly at paperwork, unable to do anything but picture Sulu on the transport and Chekov bounding forward into his arms, both of them returning to the better dimension where they came from, the one where Kirk can only see them from behind glass.  
  
“I could have you thrown in the brig for that,” Kirk says as Chekov sets his research materials on the other side of his desk and pulls up a chair.  
  
“Try it,” Chekov says, flushing and keeping his eyes on his data pads as he spreads them out. Kirk is grinning when he looks back to his reports, not sure that he can live without this. They work like that for a couple of hours, Chekov's knee bouncing, the end of his stylus looking like the chew toy of a dinosaur by the time they pack their things up.  
  
“The gym?” Chekov says when Kirk looks to him. He's nervous, fidgety, and he needs a haircut, his curls getting wild. Kirk shakes his head and takes him back to the bed instead, not wanting to tackle him or call him a cabin boy, not tonight. Chekov seems astonished the whole time Kirk is inside him, holding Kirk's burning gaze until he can't seem to stand it, his arms going around Kirk's neck, face pressing to his cheek.  
  
“ _Keptin_ ,” he whispers, and it's sweeter than _Jim_ , better.  
  
On the morning when the scouting team is scheduled to dock with the ship, Kirk lets Chekov sleep late. He watches his face, thinking about everything he knew before he loved Chekov himself, the things he learned from Sulu: the darling only child, the stubbornness, the mean honesty, the Standard words he intentionally misconjugates when he wants to be cute. In a lot of ways, he feels like Sulu had it all wrong, because he was afraid of how much loved Chekov, which made him afraid of Chekov himself. Kirk has never been afraid of him, and he wants to keep giving Chekov that, to keep pinning him down and letting him try to fight his way free, knowing that Chekov is just waiting for his pride to wear down, waiting to give in. He wants Sulu to know that about Chekov, and knows he never will.  
  
It's why Kirk can't face his quarters without Sulu, even now. He wants that secret softness back, the only man he'd ever trust to push inside him, the only one who knows him in even ways that Bones and Chekov never could. He wants to appreciate Sulu's fussy fencing maneuvers the way that Chekov can't, and to help him mix fertilizers without bothering to pretend that he cares about the scientific names of his plants, and to lie still while Sulu pulls arrow after arrow out of him, Kirk telling him that he can do it, that it's okay, that the things that are killing him need to come out. He wouldn't trust anyone else to unplug and bandage the wounds that might have otherwise bled him dry.  
  
Kirk and Chekov are glum as they dress in their uniforms, neither of them putting on any lights except for the one that shines from the open bathroom door. Sulu will be on the platform in less than an hour. Kirk shaves his face, then trims Chekov's curls for him, thinking as he pushes the clippings into the little bathroom trashcan that he'll be able to reach into it later and pull out one to keep. He still has the folded napkin that Sulu left behind on the dinner table, hidden in a back corner of his underwear drawer. He doesn't take it out, never reaches into the drawer to touch it, just needs to know that it's there, his secret. He'll fold one of Chekov's curls inside it and leave it back there, the thing that will call their ghosts back when he's alone here at night.  
  
“ _Keptin_ ,” Chekov says, catching Kirk's sleeve as they're heading toward the door. He looks broken and scared, smart enough to know that his usual defenses won't hide anything now. “What – what will we tell him?”  
  
“Nothing, remember?”  
  
“ _Nyet_ – no.” Chekov frowns, pulling Kirk to him. “You don't know what it's like to be lied to that way. You were wrong to tell him to lie to me – or maybe he told you, but – I don't want that.”  
  
“Pavel, what the fuck are you going to say? You know him. He'll quit Starfleet, kill me, kidnap you and take you to live in a cave in the desert on some uninhabited moon.”  
  
“Yes, that is exactly what will happen,” Chekov says, scowling. “ _Keptin_ , I think he still wants you, and me, too. That is why he left on this stupid quest that he is lucky to have survived. He thought he would have clarity while he was away from us, but all he was doing was running away, avoiding his problem. He's only made it worse by going away, and now he has to deal with it. We should tell him – 'Hikaru, we love you. But it's both of us or neither of us.'”  
  
Kirk laughs. “Yeah, he'll go for that. He's big on sharing.”  
  
“He's a fool, and he needs to be told so!” Chekov says, actually stomping his foot. “He can't run away from his problem – not even answering our messages? He has to confront this difficult thing as we have, and we will show him how.”  
  
“Yeah? And how did we confront this difficult thing? What, we're just going to tie him up and fuck him? He's not going to take to that as well as you did.”  
  
Chekov curses him and grabs the front of his shirt, giving him a shake.  
  
“Don't joke!” he says, starting to hyperventilate. “Hikaru will be here soon, and I – I don't know what to do – how to explain – but this is something that can be explained. Isn't it? Yes!”  
  
“Pavel.” Kirk runs his hand through Chekov's hair, then down along his jaw. “Hikaru's going to do – whatever he's going to do. He's going to pick you. He's going to make you remember why you love him, and you're going to feel guilty about me –”  
  
There's a stream of angry Russian curses, progressively louder.  
  
“Don't tell me what I'll do, or what he will do!” Chekov says. “No, fine, I forgot, you're both idiots. I'll take it from here. Just say nothing. I'll explain to Hikaru, make him understand.”  
  
Kirk rolls his eyes, and Chekov shakes him harder, glaring up at him. His eyes are red-rimmed, and Kirk feels bad, but he can't pretend this will work out. He leans down to kiss Chekov, who opens wider than Kirk would have expected, leaning up on his toes to kiss Kirk hard.  
  
“Need you to fuck me,” Chekov says, flashing Kirk an angry, desperate look.  
  
“What – now?”  
  
“Yes, please, I need it, I – I –”  
  
“Right here?” Kirk says, already backing Chekov toward the polished table in the middle of the foyer. “Yeah? We've only got ten minutes.”  
  
“I won't take that long,” Chekov says, his hands clumsy at the front of his pants. Kirk pushes them away, and Chekov whines out his gratitude as Kirk thumbs the button open and tears the zipper down.  
  
It's so good, always so good with Chekov, when he's needy and laid open, screaming with pleasure as Kirk laves his tongue over his nipples. Chekov is on his back, on the table, Kirk between his legs, watching him grip the edges of the table to brace himself against Kirk's thrusts. Chekov's knees are trembling against Kirk's sides, and Kirk loves them, his tender runner's knees, and he loves the sweat at the hollow of Chekov's throat, and the canine teeth that show when he arches on Kirk's cock, taking it as deep as he can.  
  
They both take longer to finish than they anticipated, and Kirk hurries to the bathroom to clean Chekov's come from his hand. When he walks back into the foyer, Chekov is dressed but disheveled, still breathing hard.  
  
“Thank you, _keptin_ ,” Chekov says, and it's like a frying pan to the side of the head, because Sulu said that, once, when he wanted what he had with Kirk to be over.  
  
“Don't mention it, Ensign,” Kirk says. He grabs Chekov's elbow and pulls him to the door, kissing him once before he pushes it open.  
  
Bones is standing there when it opens. Kirk is prepared to make excuses for the reason that Chekov is in his quarters at 07:00, then he remembers that they fucked right there, in the foyer, Chekov shouting and Kirk grunting as he slammed into him, the legs of the table squeaking across the marble floor.  
  
Bones stares at Kirk, his face set in stony fury. He doesn't even look at Chekov, who mostly seems confused, and maybe he really doesn't care if people know that Kirk is fucking him. Why should he; it's his right to do as he likes. Kirk knows he doesn't have the same right, and he wonders if this is how people feel when they've let their father down, wishing they could be sucked into the floor with shame.  
  
“Thought you might like some company at the transport platform,” Bones says to Kirk. “Seems you've already got some.”  
  
“Thanks anyway,” Kirk says, trying to give Bones a defiant look, probably not managing it. Bones licks over his teeth and finally looks down at Chekov, who wilts a little, his shoulder bumping against Kirk's arm.  
  
“Well,” Bones says tightly. He looks up at Kirk. “Good luck with that.”


	11. Chapter 11

Kirk is dizzy with ten kinds of regret on the way to the platform. It's almost good that Bones knows, because Kirk doesn't deserve his respect, never did. He's still the love-hungry whore Bones knew at the Academy, none of it bred out of him by the professional honors he's earned since then. He's barely seeing straight by the time they reach the transport platform. The scouting team has already arrived, and they're milling around, muttering amongst themselves and Scotty, waiting for the captain to welcome them back. Kirk barely feels capable, but he shoves his nervous energy out of the way and smiles, meeting Sulu's eyes first.  
  
“Welcome back, gentleman,” he says, beginning to applaud. Chekov and the other friends who've gathered join him, along with Scotty and his assistant. Kirk tries to hold Sulu's gaze, but he's looking at Chekov. All Kirk can think about is his come pooling in Chekov's underwear, and how Chekov outsmarted him in the end. Now they'll have no choice but to address their betrayal the way Chekov wants to. Sulu will find his boy wet with Kirk's come and demand to know who did it. Chekov will tell him, happily, insanely, either because he really is delusional enough to think the three of them could have some kind of arrangement or because this has been about him getting the ultimate revenge on Sulu and Kirk all along.  
  
Sulu looks thin and tired, and like the lights in the transport room are hurting his eyes. Kirk hears himself saying some generic things about how important this job was and how much he appreciates the risks the team took, all their hard work. Sulu is watching him while he speaks, his eyebrows arching slowly, like every word that's not meant for him hurts. Kirk is glad to return the favor after all those months of nothing but dry reports.  
  
There's more applause, and the scouting team disperses. Sulu walks down off the platform, headed directly for Chekov, who opens his arms, his lips shaking as he hurries forward to hug Sulu hard. Kirk stands back, enjoying the image of the two of them together. Even from behind the glass that sections him away from them, he can feel the heat of their reunion like fusion, the quality of the air on the ship changing as they cling to each other.  
  
Sulu pulls back, smiling down at Chekov, who is whispering Russian words that might be endearments or curses, or both. He's the one who looks over at Kirk, as if offering him to Sulu, or reminding Sulu that Kirk exists. Sulu walks to Kirk, the platform still crowded with welcomers as he makes his way toward him.  
  
“Sir,” Sulu says, and he puts out his hand.  
  
So it was that easy for him. Kirk's smile comes naturally, because he's learned how to laugh at a joke made at his expense. He shakes Sulu's hand. Chekov appears at Sulu's side, looking lost, his mouth working soundlessly.  
  
“Nice job, Lieutenant,” Kirk says, unable to make the words sound neutral, almost unable to let go of Sulu's hand. He does, turning away, but Chekov grabs his shoulder and spins him around.  
  
“We should have a drink in the _keptin_ 's quarters,” Chekov says, his eyes locked on Kirk's. He looks panicked but hopeful, like a kid who's been putting up posters for his lost pet. So he wasn't just trying to get back at them. Kirk loves him a lot for that.  
  
“If you want,” Kirk says, glancing at Sulu. He's looking back and forth between Kirk and Chekov, frowning slightly.  
  
“Okay,” he says, glancing at Kirk as if to ask him _what the hell?_  
  
“We made peace,” Kirk says, gesturing to Chekov, who shoots Kirk a look to remind him that he's going to do all the talking. Whatever gets said, they should probably wait until they're behind sound-proofed doors, so Kirk shuts up.  
  
“Hikaru, why did you not write to me?” Chekov asks, slapping his arm. “Didn't you get my message?”  
  
“Which – oh, yeah, but it was delayed for some reason,” Sulu says. He rubs at his eyes, and Kirk thinks of the cramped beds on the shuttle, the snoring security officers and the beeping equipment. Sulu needs to sleep. Chekov is going to ambush him, and Kirk won't stop him, because he needs to know how this is going to end, sooner rather than later.  
  
“I basically had, like, no down time,” Sulu says. He glances at Kirk. “Which is fine. That's what I signed up for. But yeah, sorry. I got your messages.”  
  
“I only sent one,” Chekov says, huffing at the suggestion that he would make that concession more than once.  
  
“I mean yours and Kirk's,” Sulu says.  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“So are my plants in your quarters?” Sulu asks Kirk, as if he's excited to see them, and like he remembers every word of that message upon the slightest mention of it. Kirk shakes his head.  
  
“Still in your room,” he said. “But we took care of them. They're fine.”  
  
“We!” Chekov says, slapping Kirk's arm. “Ha. The _keptin_ did everything. I would ask him, 'why do you touch this one, why do you give that one pink powder and the other one blue powder?' He would say, 'because that's what Hikaru does,' that's all he knows, he just mimicked your habits with them, but they did well for it!”  
  
“Wait,” Sulu says. He stops in his tracks, shuts his eyes for a moment and opens them again, frowning at the fact that Kirk and Chekov are both still standing in front of him. “What – how – why are you guys friends?”  
  
“It's a hilarious story!” Chekov says, his voice much too loud. He grabs Sulu and drags him toward Kirk's quarters. “We will tell you all about it. Over a drink, _da_? When is the last time you had one of those, Hikaru, not for six months? _Bozhe moi_ , I would die.”  
  
“Maybe if you'd fucking messaged us once or twice this wouldn't be such a shock,” Kirk says, his blood simmering with the opportunity to get irreversibly angry. Sulu shoots him a look, and Chekov hurries to punch in his entrance code to Kirk's quarters, something he probably shouldn't have done, but Sulu is too busy watching Kirk with growing suspicion to notice this particular incriminating detail.  
  
“I told you,” Sulu says as they all walk inside. “There was no time for messaging. If we were on shift, we were sleeping or eating. That's it. That's been my life for the past six months. I'm sorry if I didn't have time to get – updates.” He looks at Chekov, who is hurrying to Kirk's liquor cabinet. Sulu lingers in the foyer like he doesn't want to be here, and Kirk would bet that he's furious about the fact that he's not enjoying his post-mission fuck with Chekov, back in his room. If only he knew what was waiting for him between Chekov's legs, he'd be glad for this diversion. Kirk throws back the vodka Chekov serves him and goes to pour himself a refill, whiskey this time. Apparently he's a lot angrier about this whole thing than he wanted to think about before now. That fucking handshake. Motherfucker.  
  
“So, okay, this story,” Chekov says, laughing nervously. He's brought the bottle of vodka in from the cabinet, and it's sitting on the table in the foyer, which is still slightly off center.  
  
“Well, you see, we were fighting, of course, when you first left,” Chekov says. He's not standing close enough to Sulu; it's going to tip him off. Kirk just stares at Sulu, his fingers tightening on his glass every time Sulu sneaks a look at him.  
  
“Then you were missing,” Chekov says.  
  
“I wasn't missing,” Sulu says, already getting angry. Kirk is ready for a fight, but he also wants to guide Sulu's head into his lap and watch his ashen face relax into sleep.  
  
“Well, we didn't know where you were, the whole shuttle – ah, you remember.” Chekov waves his hand through the air, drinks more. His face is red. “So, you see, the _keptin_ and I worked together to try to recover the shuttle's signal. Of course we both had a special interest, because you were on it. So we were nice to each other, for your sake. And then we became friends, and the _keptin_ helped me care for your plants – it is not so hard for me to forgive him! And you, of course, but we covered that before you left. I was hurt, and jealous, but while those are – ah, natural emotions, which we should – honor, for a time, they are also worth working past if you truly love someone, yes?”  
  
Sulu shakes his head, not in answer but as if he doesn't want to listen to this because he's already got some fears about where it might be headed. Kirk would bet that none of them are even close to how bad the truth will sound.  
  
“So, um.” Chekov is fidgeting, and Kirk wants to hold his hands still, to slide his arms around Chekov's shoulders and tell him it's okay, but that would be a lie. “So, we were friends, and you were – not answering the messages, and we got to joking, and we thought, well.”  
  
 _Don't say it_ , Kirk thinks, even though some perverse part of him wants to hear it out loud and to know that Sulu has, too.  
  
“We thought – rashly, we thought: ahh, Hikaru has abandoned us! And we were mad, of course. So we – or I, maybe it was me at the start, yes, it must have been – I thought, or said – 'how about me and you, _keptin_ , would that not be – ironic?'”  
  
Kirk is staring at Sulu, and he sees the exact moment when the realization clicks. It's like watching him get torn in half, the whole world flashing red around him, his eyes widening only slightly. His hands don't curl into fists until he looks at Kirk, the color draining from his face. Kirk raises his eyebrows, throws back the last of his whiskey and lets the glass _thunk_ hard against the table.  
  
“You fucked him,” Sulu says, so livid that he can't seem to move.  
  
“No, no, it is not that simple!” Chekov says, dashing between them. “The _keptin_ and I, we both still love you, Hikaru, and we always did, all this time, but in our – perhaps foolish way of dealing with this in your absence we have –”  
  
“You fucked him,” Sulu says, stepping around Chekov, toward Kirk. “You fucked Pavel.”  
  
“It was not like that, Hikaru!” Chekov says, trying to catch Sulu's eyes, but his face is frozen in a mask of fury that isn't meant for Chekov, focused wholly on Kirk.  
  
“Did you?” Sulu asks when Kirk remains silent. He pushes around Chekov again, ignoring whatever Chekov is saying, frantic and interspersed with panicked Russian. Kirk can't hear it either, can only hear the maniacal accusation in Sulu's voice as he grabs the front of Kirk's shirt and starts shaking him, saying it again and again. “Did you? Did you? Fucking _did you_?”  
  
“Yeah, I did,” Kirk finally says, making no effort to throw Sulu off. This is better than the handshake Sulu offered, all Kirk was ever going to get. “You see that table, Hikaru? I fucked him on that table, not fifteen minutes ago. Go ahead and check, see for yourself. He's got my come running into his socks as we speak.”  
  
Chekov screams something in furious Russian, and Sulu hits Kirk, hard. Kirk isn't sure which happened first as he falls onto the table, knocking it onto its side and landing on the floor, hitting the marble with his elbows. Chekov is shouting at Sulu now, but Sulu still seems unwilling to deal with him, so he kneels down and flips Kirk over, crouching over him.  
  
“You fucking asshole, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Sulu says, spitting the words out as he holds Kirk up by his collar, Chekov tugging on his other arm, trying to pull him off.  
  
“I don't know,” Kirk says, the fight draining out of him. “I don't know.”  
  
“Hikaru, please!” Chekov says, shoving him away from Kirk. Sulu seems surprised by Chekov's new strength, and when their eyes meet he just shakes his head, looking wrecked.  
  
“How could you – how could you do that to me?” Sulu says, choking on the words, though he's not crying, just losing the ability to speak, like they've both got their hands around his throat. “It's not the same, Pavel, you fucking – it's not the fucking same!”  
  
He screams the last part so loudly that Chekov flinches backward, and Kirk gets up to steady him, but Chekov jerks away at his touch, glaring at him. Sulu is heading for the door, and he hits the control panel so hard that it buzzes an angry warning, the door sliding open slowly, broken.  
  
“Why did you do that?” Chekov asks when Sulu is gone, shoving Kirk's shoulders. “Why did you say that to him – you knew he would be angry at first, we could have talked – ”  
  
“He doesn't want to fucking talk to me, doesn't want to look at me, he wouldn't even touch me,” Kirk says, wanting Chekov gone, too, wanting them both so fucking far away.  
  
“What are you talking about? He was manhandling you, of course he'll touch you if you fucking provoke him –”  
  
“Before, on the platform – fucking – shaking my hand? He chose you, Pavel. Congratulations! Go, enjoy, he's all yours now. He'll never forgive me for putting my unworthy hands on you.”  
  
“Then I give up on you, too!” Chekov says, sobbing as he heads for the door. He kicks it as he goes, and the door makes a feeble, wounded sound, sparks shooting from the chamber where it should slide into the wall. Seeing this makes Kirk sick to his stomach, and he stumbles for the bathroom, but he can only dry heave, the bruise Sulu left on his right cheek rising, beginning to throb.  
  
For awhile, he lies on the bathroom floor, wondering what time is. He's off shift today, made sure to schedule a day away from the bridge because he anticipated something like this: the bright flash of the apocalypse, and then this crawling around on the ground in the aftermath, the only wretched survivor. He wants Bones, but Bones hates him now, too, which is what he deserves. Even the ghost of his brother has abandoned him. There's only one person left to him now, the one who's never been there for him, always in another galaxy, even when they were on the same planet, in the same house. He goes into his bedroom, picks up his communicator, and calls her anyway. He gets her voicemail box, like always.  
  
“Mom,” he says, barely getting the word out, and the pathetic sound of it makes his face pinch up with the start of a sob, so he ends the call before she can hear it.  
  
*  
  
Maintenance comes to repair the door, not asking how it got broken. When they're gone, Kirk drinks a little whiskey, but it tastes poisonous and hot, too much like fire. He lies on the sofa, the reality of what's happened coming to him in waves, sometimes retreating enough so that he doesn't have to think at all, then surging back to bury him with regret that physically hurts. He can't stop seeing them the way they were just before he tore down their last trembling support beams: Chekov with his grand plan, his embarrassed explanations, and Sulu so fucking tired, just wanting Chekov's bed, wishing he'd never let Kirk near him. It was Kirk all along, insinuating himself, ruining them. He knows now what he has to do.  
  
He doesn't want to be in his quarters when they get the news, so he goes to conference room A-7, where he can reliably be found when he's doing work off the bridge. He tries to actually get some things done, but his tongue feels too fat and his throat is tight, closing up already. Signing the orders was the hardest thing he's ever done short of helping the paramedics peel his hysterical mother from his brother's body, but maybe that's the only important thing he's ever done for anybody, and this is similar, only he's pushing two people back together now.  
  
Sulu comes first, kicking the door open, looking like he could take on a whole pub full of aliens who are twice his size. He throws the crumpled piece of Federation stationary onto Kirk's desk.  
  
“What the fuck is that?” he shouts, pointing at it like it's a dead rat that Kirk left on his pillow. “What the fuck do you think you're doing?”  
  
“Don't worry,” Kirk says, his voice flat. He hasn't slept since Chekov left his bed, probably just needs a body pillow or something; he can't be trusted with much more. “I transferred him, too, to the same ship.”  
  
“Yeah, he told me,” Sulu says, narrowing his eyes and sputtering with disbelief for a moment. “Are you – are you fucking crazy? You're sending us to the _Reliant_? What the fuck gives you the right?”  
  
“You'll thank me,” Kirk says. “And it makes logical sense. I can't have people who've lost all respect for me serving under me, and I've done everything I can to lose your respect. I'm sorry, Hikaru. I fucked up. But this ship – this is the one thing I can do. The only thing I've ever been good at, and I need to stay here. You'll be a great pilot for them, and you'll have him –”  
  
“You're out of your fucking mind,” Sulu says, pointing at Kirk, shaking with rage. “I'll send you up to the fucking review board for this, I swear to God.”  
  
“You're welcome to,” Kirk says. “I deserve to face consequences for the way I've fucked with the emotions of personnel on my bridge. But it happens, Hikaru, you took the same psychology classes that I did at the Academy. People form these attachments on long missions, and it always gets complicated. Considering the circumstances – what happened with Chekov – I don't think they'd take my ship from me, but – ”  
  
“Take your – you think that's what I want?” Sulu mostly looks like he wants to hit Kirk, and to keep hitting him until Kirk knows how he feels, bruised beyond recognition. Kirk is already familiar with that feeling, but maybe it's best that Sulu doesn't realize that.  
  
“I don't know what you want,” Kirk says, his voice sharpening a little. “Except to be left alone with Pavel, right? Well, you've got it. The two of you can get on with your lives, without me.”  
  
Sulu just stares at him for awhile, breathing in angry huffs, his mouth hanging open. He looks like he's only now realizing how fucked up Kirk really is, which is probably good timing.  
  
“I'm sorry that this means you won't be serving here anymore, 'cause God knows we need you,” Kirk says. “But I just don't see how it can work. It's not practical, not with these tensions. If you think you need a recommendation for alpha shift pilot – ”  
  
“Fuck you,” Sulu says, his voice weakened and full of disbelief as he turns to go. Kirk doesn't try to stop him, just looks down at the stylus in his hand, turning it between his fingers before lifting it to his lips. Chewing on the end isn't nearly as satisfying as Chekov makes it look.  
  
Chekov arrives less than an hour later, looking like the ghost that Kirk was afraid he'd see in the closet door. He's pale and exhausted, making no attempt to hide the grief in his eyes.  
  
“ _Keptin_ ,” he says, after standing in front of Kirk's desk in silence for a few minutes.  
  
“I know,” Kirk says. “I'm sorry.”  
  
Chekov stares down at the floor, opens his hands at his sides and lets them flop against his legs in defeat. When he looks up at Kirk again he's not asking for anything, not with his eyes or his posture or his open, speechless mouth.  
  
“You don't know what you've done,” he finally says, seeming to speak to some other Kirk who's standing behind the stoic one at the desk.  
  
“Yes, I do,” Kirk says. “That's why I'm getting both of you far away from me.”  
  
Chekov makes a disgusted little sound, as if to say that he can't stand to hear Kirk's voice anymore, and waves his hand through the air before walking out of the room.  
  
Kirk stares down at the data pad on his desk, trying to remember something, anything, that he ever wanted as much as he wanted them, and how he survived not getting it. All he can come up with are the things that they made him forget and forgive, the things that he didn't survive at all, until they revived him.  
  
*  
  
Sulu and Chekov have two days to wrap up their work on the _Enterprise_ before they're due to report to the _Reliant_. Kirk steers clear of the bridge, and of the two of them. The Grotliun system is quiet beyond the walls of the ship, menacing. Even beaming Sulu and Chekov back to the last chance space station will be tricky, but they'll be safer on the _Reliant_ , which will be in peaceful systems for the remaining year of its own mission. Kirk has spoken personally with the captain, and he's tried to hide the fact that he knows he's won a kind of lottery, getting the best pilot and the best navigator in the fleet in return for standard operators who will view the reassignment to the _Enterprise_ as a promotion. Kirk tries not to think about how they'll get through these last six months without Sulu flying and Chekov bouncing them through the minefields like he's shooting pool, that chewed-up stylus rapping against the conn until Uhura tells him she can't think straight. Kirk has other pilots, other navigators, and whatever becomes of the best ones in the fleet, they'll be better off without him.  
  
He waits for a message from Bones, something simple and harsh that will tell him he's being an idiot and beg him to reconsider. Nothing comes. Everyone steers clear of Kirk, and he dreams of mutiny every night. When he wakes on the night before Sulu and Chekov's departure and finds Sam sitting on the end of his bed, he's almost relieved.  
  
“You want to get high?” Sam asks after studying Kirk for awhile. He looks younger and less malicious than usual, and he's holding out a can of synthax, the stuff that their mother used to decontaminate her clothes after returning from space. Sam used it to try to decontaminate himself, eventually, to wash the things that space had taken from him away.  
  
“Yeah,” Kirk says, but when he reaches for the can Sam laughs and pulls it away.  
  
“I was the smart one,” Sam says. “You were just the lucky one.”  
  
“Shit. This is lucky?”  
  
“Lucky to be alive. That's the only kind of luck there is. Trust me.”  
  
Kirk wakes up early and finds himself alone. He's tired of his dreams and his hallucinations and everything in between. If he had a dream diary he would write the same thing on every page, in big, black letters: _NOTHING_. All he wants is sleep, the kind he had when he was wrapped around Sulu and then Chekov, and it's made him crazy with megalomania, thinking that he should be allowed to make war until he regains that peace.  
  
He stands in the shower for a long time, wondering if he should even see Sulu and Chekov off at the platform. It would look bad if he didn't. He's pretty sure he already looks bad.  
  
His communicator is lit up with a message when he gets out of the shower, and he doesn't want to deal with it, but doing this one thing that he's good at means that he doesn't get to hide, even when his world is ending. He listens to the message, not really processing the words from the transport deck operator, his fear that Sulu and Chekov have already gone making him temporarily deaf and dumb. Once he's calmed down he realizes that the operator is telling him that there hasn't been a departure but an arrival, someone to see him.  
  
The last time he saw his mother was shortly before he left on this mission. She missed his medal ceremony at the Academy because of heavy transport traffic, everyone either hurrying to see the heroes home or to weep at the feet of the officials who'd let the rest of the fleet be destroyed. They were supposed to have dinner later that night, but the transporter stations were still jammed, so they canceled it, and didn't meet up for months, just before Kirk shipped out. That was almost five years ago.  
  
His mother looks younger than she did then, but that's what being in space has always done for her. She's been on a research station for the past two years, translating mangled communications from the edges of civilization. Kirk didn't even think about the fact that she was here, in the most dangerous quadrant of space, and definitely didn't avoid this segment of the mission until the last year because of this unconscious knowledge.  
  
She smiles as he leans forward to hug her, and he ducks her eyes, embarrassed when he thinks about how that one-word message he left on her voicemail must have sounded. She's not in uniform, which seems strange, though she left Starfleet ten years ago and works for an independent group of scientists now.  
  
“Thought I'd drop by,” she says, studying Kirk's eyes, trying to see into him. He doesn't want her to.  
  
“Well, good to see you,” he says. He takes her arm and leads her from the transport room, aware that the two officers who are working the console will have a thousand theories about the timing of this visit, and that most of them will conclude with the most obvious and likely possibility, that the captain is losing his mind.  
  
“Let me show you around,” Kirk says, uncomfortable with how quiet she's being and how close she's hovering, her eyes on his pitted cheeks, the old acne scars that never got treated because she was in space and Frank didn't give a shit.  
  
“I don't have that much time, honey,” she says. “Maybe you could just show me your quarters? I'd like to see this aquarium you're always talking about.”  
  
The aquarium: he tells his mother about things like this, his hobbies, his captainly possessions. Never about anything more. They've never even had a real conversation about Sam, because they both know it would devolve into brutal, unforgivable blame. She was gone, but Kirk was there, and he did nothing.  
  
“So, here it is,” Kirk says as he leads her inside, his throat tightening at the sight of the table in the foyer, which he should have gotten rid of. He feels like his mother will see it and know everything, like she's known everything about him all along and kept her mouth shut out of politeness, or embarrassment.  
  
“Jimmy,” his mother says, turning from the fish, her gray-blond hair in a frizzy halo with the aquarium lights glowing behind her. “What – I got your message – ”  
  
“That was – you can disregard that.”  
  
“Your face, did someone hit you?”  
  
“Look, I'm sorry, but this isn't great timing, it's kind of a busy day for me –”  
  
“You don't have to pretend for me,” his mother says sharply, grabbing his wrists. He lets himself look at her for the first time since he saw her in the transport room, and he doesn't like the things he recognizes in her eyes, the parts of him that have never really reflected back before now.  
  
“Not anymore,” his mother says, lifting his hands up, kissing his thumbs. “You don't have to pretend that you're okay. I know when you're not. I've always known, I just – after Sammy, I thought there was nothing I could do for you, that I would only hurt you the way I'd hurt him, without meaning to. Jimmy, tell me, baby. Just tell me what's wrong.”  
  
“Nothing – don't – it's nothing.” Kirk scoffs and pulls free, needing to get out of sight of that table, of the fish who've seen everything. His mother has, too, all this time, from many galaxies away. It's something he knew but didn't really want to think about. He goes into the sitting area and falls down onto the sofa, putting his elbows on his knees, wishing she would take a hint. His mother sits down beside him and touches his back.  
  
“God, I hate to see you this lonely,” she says. “You're almost thirty years old, Jimmy, surrounded by all these people who admire you, who want to know you. Don't make yourself this way, don't do what I did after I lost your father.”  
  
“I'm not you,” Kirk says, scoffing. “It's not like I have a husband who died, that's –”  
  
“No, but you have a father who died, and a brother. And a mother who – might as well have, for all the good I did for you after we lost Sammy. I'm so sorry, Jim, and I always think – you don't want me in your life, which I understand, but that message – ”  
  
“It's okay – you don't have to – fucking apologize.” Kirk gets up from the couch, pacing, hating her, knowing she'll leave again. “I was the little – leftover – scrap, I never expected you to feel for me what you did for them –”  
  
“Jimmy, stop,” his mother says, her voice wavering. “Don't – judge yourself by the way I treated you. I was – mentally ill, they should have taken you away from me –”  
  
“Exactly!” Kirk shouts, his eyes shooting open wide when he turns back to her, panting out a disbelieving laugh. “That's – that's exactly what I'm doing, see, this confirms that it's the right thing. You should know when the people you care about would be better off without you, and I – learned from your fucking mistakes, Mom, so thanks, thank you.”  
  
She shakes her head slowly, bringing one hand to her mouth, then to the corner of her eye as she looks away, sniffling away her tears. Kirk wants to hurt her, he does, but he can't see her like this, because it takes him too far back, to the days when he thought that if she could just stop crying maybe she would finally look him in the eyes.  
  
“If I could go back,” she says.  
  
“Well, you can't, Mom, and neither can I. But fuck it, right, look at us, we're doing okay. This is what we do, we go to space, we work like dogs, it's what we're good at, it's more than some people have. You never tried to deviate from that course, and I won't fucking try it again, either.”  
  
“I don't want you to cheat yourself out of what I had with your father,” his mother says, her lip trembling again. “Not because of me, oh, _please_ , not because of the way I was – the way I am. Even after he was gone – we were happy, sometimes, Jimmy, remember, when Sammy was alive?”  
  
“I don't know what I fucking remember about my brother,” Kirk says. “It's all screwed up in my head. I remember that he ruined my life, and yours, and for what? Because he was bored and angry? Well, good for him, and now he's blameless and holy, even though he didn't give a shit about you and me.”  
  
“Jimmy, your brother didn't kill himself – not – not intentionally,” his mother says, her eyes fluttering shut as her voice raises. “He was a teenage boy, he didn't know what he was doing, and I – I was the selfish one, leaving him there with Frank, which was as good as asking him to raise you himself.”  
  
“He didn't give a shit about me,” Kirk says, the lie in this making his voice shake. “He just wanted to get high and get me out of his fucking hair.”  
  
“You don't remember,” his mother says, standing from the couch but not approaching him, though he can see that she wants to, her hands trembling at her sides. “Jimmy, I know – it was all I could remember for a long time, too, the way he was in the year before he died, when he started hanging around those bad boys, doing that drug – but that was such a – such a small part of him, and you were so young, oh, God, but he loved you so much, don't you remember how much he wanted to impress you? When he climbed that silo to show you that you had the strongest brother in the neighborhood? He would do anything to prove he could take care of you. He was just a boy, he didn't know how to take care of anyone, not even himself, but he did the best he could – oh, I wish you could remember, Jimmy, the way he really was.”  
  
She puts her hands over her face and sobs into them, the sight making Kirk's eyes burn and then leak at the corners. He wipes them clear and walks to her, touching her shoulders, still wanting to forgive her, always needing to make her stop crying.  
  
“Don't – I'm sorry,” Kirk says. “I shouldn't – take it out on you, it's just –”  
  
“No, God, don't try to protect my feelings,” she says, lifting her wet face from her hands. “You always did, and I took – took advantage of it, because I was so weak from losing Sammy, but it wasn't right, I shouldn't have let you protect me.” She whimpers a little and puts her hand to Kirk's cheek. “My good boy, just like your dad, you always wanted to protect everybody.”  
  
“Not Sam, though,” Kirk says, choking out the words. “I didn't tell you. I knew it was worse than you realized, the fucking drugs, how sad he was –”  
  
“Baby, you couldn't have saved him,” his mother says, stroking the tears from his cheek. “Not that year, or the next, or ten years from now, if that was when he decided to self-destruct. He was – it was my fault, what happened to your brother. That's why I lost my mind when he died, because I knew, and if George knew –” She loses her words then, her shoulders shaking hard with sobs as Kirk pulls her to him, holding her against his chest. He can't believe how small she is now, can't believe she's the same woman who lifted him off the floor and spun him in her arms when she came back from space, letting him cling like he would never let her go again.  
  
“I'm so sorry,” she cries. “So sorry.”  
  
“It's okay,” Kirk says, smoothing her hair down as his tears leak into it. “You didn't – we knew why you didn't take us to space with you. It wasn't because you didn't care, we knew that, we knew you loved us. You were scared, that's all. We knew you were just scared to lose us the way you lost Dad.”  
  
“Please don't be scared like that, not ever, please,” his mother says, pulling back to look up at him, her face still pinched with tears. “Don't try to protect the people you love in any way that – keeps you from them. I would do anything to go back and take you two with me, to take that risk so that we could be together.”  
  
Kirk shakes his head and walks to the couch, falling to a seat again. His mother sighs and wipes her face clear with her palms before sitting down beside him.  
  
“Let me show you something,” she says, pulling out her PADD. “So you'll remember your brother.”  
  
It's a video from when Kirk was five years old, from the old farmhouse. He's wearing a mini Starfleet costume, dressed up for Halloween. He remembers begging his mother to get it for him, her strange hesitation. In the video, he's running around the living room in it, his mother laughing behind the camera as Kirk proclaims himself the best, strongest captain in the fleet, who's just saved an alien planet from an evil emperor, single-handedly.  
  
“What! You traitor!” someone shouts from off camera, and it's Sam, wearing a homemade alien costume, complete with a grotesque mask and gloves with plastic claws.  
  
“I don't remember this,” Kirk says, fidgeting.  
  
“I know you don't,” his mother says. “Just watch.”  
  
“I helped you defeat the emperor, you human traitor!” Sam says in the video, scooping Kirk off the floor. Kirk is delighted by the attention, laughing wildly while Sam holds him upside-down by his ankles.  
  
“No, you didn't!” Kirk says, giggling. “It was all me, only me!”  
  
“I should have known you'd betray me, Jim,” Sam says, dragging Kirk up onto the couch. “Now you'll know the pain of the Quiox'ian lava pits!” He holds Kirk over the back of the couch, cackling while Kirk laughs and struggles.  
  
“Don't drop him on his head,” Kirk's mother warns from behind the camera.  
  
“I won't,” Sam says, looking offended at the suggestion when he pushes the alien mask up onto the top of his head. Kirk hasn't seen an image of Sam at this age in a long time – maybe ever? They didn't exactly sit around watching videos like this after Sam died; it was too hard. He'd forgotten Sam's freckles, and how much Sam hated them, because he thought they made him look like a baby.  
  
“Careful,” his mother says in the video, when Kirk begins to slip out of Sam's hands, wiggling hard, trying to prove that he's stronger than his brother, trying to get free. “Sam – watch him!”  
  
Sam tries to wrangle Kirk properly, but one of Kirk's sneakers connects with Sam's chin, stunning him, and Kirk tumbles to the floor. There's a snatch of the panicked look on Sam's face just before Kirk's mother curses and the video camera is held down at her side as she rushes to see if Kirk is okay. Kirk is wailing, and Sam is scrambling toward him, the video a mess of seasick movement now.  
  
“Baby, are you okay – Sammy, you were playing too rough!”  
  
“Jimmy – Jimmy, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.”  
  
“Dummy,” Kirk cries, sniffling and smacking Sam's chest as their mother sighs and lifts the camera to point it to them again.  
  
“I'm going to show you this video next time you're rough-housing with him and you tell me that nobody's going to get hurt,” Kirk's mother says, pointing the camera at Sam, who scowls, then pouts, his arm wrapped around Kirk's shoulders.  
  
“He's okay,” Sam says, the alien mask lost in the shuffle, lying behind him on the floor. He pets Kirk's hair and looks down into his face. “You're okay, right, Jimmy?” he says, pulling Kirk fully into his lap.  
  
“No,” Kirk says, and Sam and their mother both laugh as Kirk presses his petulant face to his brother's chest, hugging him. The video ends there, and Kirk almost exclaims in protest, the image of Sam's face smiling at the camera snapping away, replaced by a blank screen.  
  
“I, ah, I went to get you a band-aid, then,” Kirk's mother says. She turns off her PADD and slides it back into her pocket, looking to Kirk, who is still staring at the spot where she held it.  
  
“I forgot about – that day at the tower,” Kirk says. “I told him – I was egging him on with the other guys. It wasn't until he started climbing, getting too high, that was when I wanted him to stop. I started crying, I went and told you. He got so mad at me. He wanted to believe that – that he could have come down all by himself. I know he must have been scared, but he didn't want me to know that. He was never going to let me – save him.”  
  
Kirk loses it then, missing his brother so much that he feels like he'll be sick. His mother holds him while he cries, like he's a little boy again, sniffling over a skinned knee, Sam looking on guiltily.  
  
“I love you so much,” his mother says, stroking his hair as he tries to force himself to calm down, to get the sight of Sam's concerned little face out of his head, and the memories of sitting in his brother's lap, so happy for the attention, safe and beloved.  
  
“And I loved you then, after Sam – I know I didn't show it, maybe I was afraid to, but you were my whole world, my reason to live, my best friend. I was so impressed with you, every single day.”  
  
“I think I'm tired of being impressive,” Kirk says, sniffling.  
  
“Well, get used to it,” his mother says. “You tried to fight it, all those years of aimlessness before you joined Starfleet, but you could never stop yourself from doing the right thing when you had to. Sammy was like me, so emotional, too raw. You're like George. You might hesitate, because you're human, but you're programmed to fix things, save everyone. You can't fight that, even when it's impossible. You tried so hard to fix me all those years, Jimmy, and I loved you so, so much for believing that you could. Don't you dare think that was wasted, even if I couldn't be fixed. Sometimes you can't – set things right again, go back to normal. Sometimes normal isn't an option, and it wasn't for us, but you were there for me, and we loved each other. You loved me more than I deserved, and I loved you so much more than I could show you then.”  
  
Kirk says nothing, just rests his head on his mother's shoulder, knowing that she has to leave soon and that they won't see each other again for a long time. It's always possible that this could be the last time they see each other at all. She's more like Kirk's father than she knows. She kept going to space after his death because she needed it, like Kirk's father did, and like Kirk does. It's not the danger, not some kind of thrill, it's their duty, these jobs that they believe they can do better than anyone else, and Kirk has compromised his. He sits up and rubs his eyes clear.  
  
“There's something I have to do,” he says, and his mother nods.  
  
“I have to go, too,” she says. “Are you going to be okay? Do you have anyone here you can – talk to?”  
  
“Yeah,” Kirk says, thinking of Bones. “I do, I just – needed you.”  
  
She smiles and pulls him in to hug him. Kirk shuts his eyes and breathes in the smell of her hair, remembering sitting in the front seat of his father's old convertible when he was a little boy, between his mother and Sam, the wind so loud that all they could do was smile at each other.  
  
He sees her to the transport platform and hugs her goodbye, watching as she dematerializes on the platform. When he's seen the green light on the console that means she's safely reached her destination, he thanks the transport operator and walks back toward the crew quarters, his eyes and his head clear now, his heart still heavy.  
  
There's less than an hour before Sulu and Chekov are scheduled to report to the _Reliant_ when Kirk knocks on Sulu's door. He's already spoken to the captain of the _Reliant_ but hasn't put in the official order yet. There's still the chance that they've decided they want to leave, and he doesn't want to force them to stay, either.  
  
Sulu opens the door, and the lost look on his face indicates that he wasn't expecting Kirk. His features harden when their eyes meet, and Kirk can see Chekov behind him on the bed, sitting up. He's fully clothed but clearly forgiven, peeking around Sulu's side to look at Kirk.  
  
“What?” Sulu says when Kirk just stands there, taking in the sight of them, Chekov adjusting his wrinkled uniform as he comes to stand beside Sulu.  
  
“I just wanted to tell you guys – I'm sorry about the – dramatic gesture the other day,” Kirk says. “That was – I thought I was being professional, but the truth is, I don't want this ship flying through the diciest quadrants we'll see on this mission without you two at the helm. We'll work around our personal issues however we have to – it's all petty compared to the lives of the people on this ship. If – if you feel like you'd prefer to be reassigned –”  
  
“Of course we don't!” Chekov says. He looks up at Sulu and tugs on his arm. “Right, Hikaru?”  
  
Sulu says nothing, his eyes locked on Kirk's. He's stoic, not even blinking, his hand still on the door's control pad, like he's trying to decide whether or not he should close it in Kirk's face.  
  
“We've been awake all night,” Chekov says, letting out his breath in a rush, touching the heel of his hand to his forehead. “Trying to think of how to convince you to let us stay. We knew you'd regret it, _keptin_ , we still –”  
  
“Thanks,” Sulu says to Kirk, firing the word at him like a bullet. “We'll stay.”  
  
“ _Keptin_ , come in, please,” Chekov says, trying to pull Sulu from the doorway. “We should talk – oh, look at your face, is that from –”  
  
“No,” Kirk says, backing away, humiliated. Sulu doesn't want him in there. He's got Chekov, warm in his bed, and Kirk knows how good that feels. Chekov just feels sorry for him, and Sulu is done with him. The bruise on Kirk's face throbs as he hurries away, as if Sulu has struck him again.  
  
He's running on autopilot when he sends the confirmation to the captain of the _Reliant_ , who is not happy, but fuck him. Kirk is keeping the best pilot and the best navigator for his own ship, and he's going to figure out how to get past what he's done to them – what they've all done to each other. He's pretty sure he'll always love them, but it doesn't have to be about sex. He can have sex with anyone; it's just something to get out of his system, like always. If that's all he has to sacrifice to keep them close, he'll live.  
  
He's still feeling a little too wrecked to talk to Bones, just needs to be alone for awhile. The gym doesn't close for another five hours, so he goes to the rec garden instead, to the only place where no one will come looking for him, congratulating him on not fucking over the end of the mission by transferring Sulu and Chekov. Kirk is embarrassed, and tired, but he's going to be alright. In another six months, the mission will be over, successful and lucrative, giving way to another six months of interviews with the Federation, lectures and speeches, plenty of work to fill his time before he's sent out again. Maybe he'll look into swimming the English channel while he's at it.  
  
He walks past the pond and slips past the waterfall, half-expecting the little blue flowers to have been removed, pulled up in angry handfuls by Sulu. When he finds them there, still covering the soft, grassy area behind the artificial rocks, blowing in the vent-generated breeze, he drops down to his knees. He's got nothing left in him and it's not even noon. He props himself up against the rocks, listening to the waterfall and staring at the flowers, picking them one at a time, rolling their bright green stems between his fingers. Maybe he'll stay back here all day, until every one of them has been plucked.  
  
“Jim.”  
  
He thinks he's hallucinating when he looks up and sees Sulu, remembering that day, then he realizes what's really happening. Sulu's offer to use this place has been rescinded, and Chekov is shuffling shyly behind him, waiting for Kirk to clear out.  
  
“Oh, sorry,” Kirk says, standing, but Sulu steps forward and holds him still. Kirk peeks over Sulu's shoulder, but Chekov isn't there. The rec garden is empty except for a thin gray bird that is drinking from the lagoon.  
  
“I'll go,” Kirk says, because maybe Sulu hasn't invited Chekov here yet, but that doesn't mean he wants Kirk polluting the place. Again, Sulu holds him steady, staring at him, and Kirk notices that he's breathing a little strongly, as if he ran here.  
  
“Where's Chekov?” Kirk asks. He never, ever wants Sulu to let him go, and when Sulu keeps holding him still, his hands on Kirk's shoulders, it's not enough for hope, but something similar peeks from between Kirk's ribs.  
  
“Pavel's in my room,” Sulu says. “I needed – I thought I needed to be alone for awhile, to think. But I'm glad you're here.” His hands slide from Kirk's shoulders, up to cup his face, and he backs Kirk behind the rocks again, hiding him from the rest of the room.  
  
“I'm sorry,” Kirk says, determined not to return the look Sulu is giving him, like he's going to get kissed and held and saved. “I fucked everything up. You guys deserve better.”  
  
“No,” Sulu says, firm and almost unfriendly. “Stop.”  
  
“Stop – what?”  
  
“Stop blaming yourself. Everything that happened was my fault. Pavel knows that. I didn't – want you to know that, to see me like that, to see through me the way he does, but it's not fair. I'm the one who fucked it up, all of it. I shouldn't have lied to him when he came back. I shouldn't have lashed out at you for making me want you so bad even when I had him. I shouldn't have ignored your messages. I shouldn't have –” His voice chokes away and he touches Kirk's bruise very softly, making Kirk shiver as he runs his thumb over it. “I shouldn't have hit you.”  
  
“Yes, you should have,” Kirk says, trying to get angry on Sulu's behalf, to defend him. “What I said – God, I fucking asked you to hit me. I don't know what else you would have done.”  
  
“Pavel is crazy,” Sulu says, shaking his head. “He's – too used to getting what he wants, he didn't grow up with sibling rivalry, he doesn't get it. He thinks we can all – figure it out together. That's bullshit.”  
  
“I know,” Kirk says, heartsick. He doesn't want Sulu to leave Chekov, doesn't want to leave Chekov himself, but if Sulu decides to stay with Chekov, Kirk knows now, with Sulu's hands on him, the blue flowers at his feet: he won't make it. He'll become somebody else, most of what he likes about himself fading into obscurity.  
  
“But I won't give you up,” Sulu says, his voice cracking as he crushes his mouth to Kirk's. He kisses him with punishing force, and only then does Kirk realize that it's been six months – only six months. It feels like six years since he's had this as Sulu guides him down into the grass, those blue flowers tickling against Kirk's ears when Sulu pins him to the ground.  
  
“I hoped you would be here,” Sulu says, his hands shaking as he fumbles a thin tube of lube from his pocket. “I missed you, need to be in you, God, fuck, Jim, need you so bad –”  
  
“Yeah, yeah,” Kirk cries, nodding and fastening his mouth to Sulu's neck as Sulu pushes his pants down first, then Kirk's. “But – Chekov,” Kirk says, holding Sulu up by his shoulders when he dives in to kiss Kirk again.  
  
“I told him where I was going, that I was looking for you.” Sulu smirks, looking sad. “He's the one who told me to bring lube.”  
  
“That's –”  
  
“I know. I told you. He's crazy. He loves you, I think.”  
  
“And you,” Kirk says, and they stare at each other for awhile, until they're both blushing hard, kissing with their eyes pinched shut. Sulu is so heavy on Kirk, forcing Kirk's wrists to the ground, making him give up control. Kirk opens his eyes and stares up at the projected sky, the pale blue edged with something darker, as if a rainstorm could really threaten here. He moans as Sulu bites his way down his neck, closing his teeth over the slope between Kirk's neck and shoulder.  
  
“I hate who I am without you,” Kirk says as Sulu licks over the bite mark he's left. “Fuck you for doing that to me.” He bends his knees, clamping them around Sulu's sides. “And don't ask me to let you leave again, because I won't.”  
  
“Okay,” Sulu whispers, down into Kirk's open mouth. “Okay, Jim, okay.”  
  
Kirk doesn't think about what this means, what sort of agreement they're forging or bond they're breaking, just arches and arches until Sulu is as deep as Kirk can get him, tripping every secret nerve, pulling him apart and then putting him together again when he slams back in. Kirk never wants to stop, and doesn't even think about coming until Sulu is tugging on him slow and firm, whispering, _come on, come on, let me see you, want to feel you come_.  
  
He must feel it, because he screams along with Kirk when Kirk pinches up tight with his orgasm, his ass shuddering as Sulu pumps him dry, fucking him through it, starting to lose control himself. He's shaking, sweating under his shirt, and Kirk loves that Sulu left his shirt on, pulling him down so he can feel it chafe over his nipples, command gold spilling into him like fresh paint rubbing off on his skin.  
  
“Been saving this for you,” Sulu says, biting the words out against Kirk's lips. “Wanting it so bad, so deep in you – God, fuck, Jim, I'd follow you anywhere, don't you fucking send me away again.”  
  
“Won't, couldn't, I couldn't,” Kirk says, blubbering. He shouts when Sulu slams in with a growl, filling him with come, and they hold on to each other as he rides it out, as if either of them is going anywhere, now.  
  
They huddle together afterward, Sulu's forehead pressed to Kirk's as Kirk rubs his thumb over every sacred spot on Sulu's hands, kissing them intermittently, tired enough to sleep back here for days. He's not sure where Sulu will go now – to Chekov? That's where Kirk wants to go, but he's afraid to ask if he can come along. It wouldn't make any sense, but nothing else has, so far.  
  
“We were going to refuse to leave,” Sulu says while Kirk licks at the pad of Sulu's index finger. “Me and Pavel. That was our big plan. We were so desperate to stay here. I didn't want to say why, but he told me. He knows I love you. I think he's glad, 'cause it lets him off the hook.”  
  
Kirk almost misses it, so focused on the fact that he's allowed to touch Sulu's hands again. _He knows I love you_. He looks up at Sulu, who seems to have missed it all together, not backtracking or blushing. He smiles, and reaches over Kirk's shoulder to pick one of the blue flowers.  
  
“Fucking uncanny,” he says, holding it up to Kirk's right eye. “I could never come back here and not think about you. You're in all my secret places now. I've got nowhere to run.”  
  
“What about him?” Kirk asks, not willing to count his chickens yet. “Pavel – I stole him from you – not really, because he still, but –”  
  
“Pavel is not steal-able,” Sulu says. “We belong to each other – I can't even tell you how completely, it would sound ridiculous out loud. That's why you fell for both of us, I think. You couldn't love one of us without the other, it just wouldn't work.”  
  
“What the hell are you saying?” Kirk asks. “You don't actually want to – try this thing he's talking about, do you? Is there even a word for it?”  
  
“There is, but it's pretty inadequate.” Sulu sits up with a groan, pieces of grass in his hair, and one little blue flower, which falls from his hair down onto the back of his rumpled shirt. “I can't think of any words I'd – feel comfortable with. I don't know what's going to happen. I just – we should go see him.”  
  
“Yeah,” Kirk says, sitting up. He's reluctant, refastening his pants with slow deliberation, afraid that this will blow up in their faces, sooner rather than later. He takes Sulu's hand and allows him to help him, looking down at the crushed grass and flowers, the shapes their bodies left behind.  
  
“Hey,” Sulu says, clapping Kirk's shoulder as he stares down at the mess they've made. “You can't break some eggs without baking a cake, right?”  
  
Kirk snorts. “I think it's the other way around.”  
  
“Not if I say so,” Sulu says, and he pulls Kirk against him as they walk out of the rec garden. It's one o'clock in this artificial world, the sun high and bright on the ceiling, the birds hidden away in the shade, fooled by the illusion. Or maybe they're not; maybe they're just playing along, because why shouldn't they. It's not like they're going to see the real sun anytime soon, and this one gives them what they need.  
  
When they get back to Sulu's room, Chekov is sitting on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees, looking like he's waiting for test results that he knows will be bad. He stands up as they come through the door, touching his hips uncertainly. Kirk made sure to remove all the grass from Sulu's hair, but it's not like Chekov doesn't know what just happened, and for a moment none of them knows what to say.  
  
“I'll go,” Chekov blurts, nodding as if this is something they've asked for. His eyes are wide, confidence shattered, the experiment he just performed not exactly a rousing success. “It wasn't fair of me to come back. I'll go.”  
  
He starts for the door and Sulu rolls his eyes, catching Chekov's shoulders. He holds him out in front of him, and gives him a long look, something unspoken passing between them, making Chekov's eyebrows arch less pathetically.  
  
“C'mere, Pavel,” Kirk says, jealous of that connection, even though he has his own with both of them. He walks over and picks Chekov up by the waist, making Sulu laugh as Kirk carries him to the bed and sinks down around him.  
  
“This is crazy,” Sulu says, but he's taking his pants off, watching with interest as Kirk pushes Chekov's hair back from his forehead, staring down into his worried eyes.  
  
“But Pavel thinks it will work, and he's a genius,” Kirk says. Chekov scowls at him, moaning when Kirk dips down to lick his neck. Sulu kneels onto the other side of the bed, in only his boxer shorts now, still flushed from sex with Kirk. He stretches out along Chekov's other side, and Kirk follows Sulu's lead when he reaches up under Chekov's shirt to thumb his nipple. Chekov gasps and spreads his legs, looking back and forth between them as they kiss his cheeks and stroke his chest.  
  
“Too much?” Sulu asks softly, and Chekov looks over at him, shaking his head.  
  
“You underestimate me,” Chekov says, but he's trembling, and he kisses Sulu hard when he leans in, hungry for that familiar taste. Sulu nudges him off with his nose, giving him permission, and they share a long look before Chekov turns to Kirk, smiling.  
  
“ _Keptin_ ,” he says, sighing into the kiss Kirk gives him, those soft swipes of his tongue so good against Kirk's, and the thought that Sulu is seeing this – getting hard from this, if what Kirk finds with his wandering hand is to be believed – is even better. He lets his hand slide from Sulu's cock to the bulge in Chekov's pants, and nips at Chekov's lips when he moans. Sulu's hand covers Kirk's, and they stroke him together, watching his face and not even halfway expecting him to come suddenly and hard, jerking under their hands as he cries through it, his hips pumping, come leaking out from the waistband of his briefs.  
  
“Damn, Pavel,” Sulu says, and Chekov laughs deliriously, his eyes still closed. Kirk rubs his fingers through Chekov's hair, not sure what's happening, just that he doesn't want to leave this bed.  
  
“Want you to watch him fuck me now,” Chekov says, whispering this against Sulu's cheek like it's a secret, finally drawing a blush from him. Sulu's eyes sneak up to Kirk's.  
  
“Yeah, I – think I'd like to see,” he says, wetting his bottom lip, and Kirk barely catches a ridiculously powerful moan, swallowing it down.  
  
“Alright,” Kirk says, his cock already throbbing in his pants from watching Chekov come for both of them, so easily, so eager. Chekov is pulling his clothes off now, still lazy with his orgasm, and Kirk wants to see Sulu fuck Chekov, too, is going to ask for that next.  
  
They're in Sulu's bedroom for the next four hours, and no one comes knocking, the news about Sulu and Chekov staying on the _Enterprise_ surely having spread by now. It's weird at moments, Kirk fucking hard little pants out of Chekov and looking up to see Sulu staring at him, looking like he's trying to decide whether he wants to kill Kirk or fuck him again, but then Kirk pulls Chekov up and says _Suck our ensign, Lieutenant_ , and Sulu obeys without hesitation, making Chekov come again, the spasms of his ass pulling Kirk over the edge.  
  
They crush together in every combination they can imagine, pulling apart and reshuffling again and again, until they're all dirty and tired, Chekov most of all, face-planted on the bed and sighing as Kirk and Sulu lean over his back to kiss before flopping down around him. Sulu slides his hand across Chekov's sweaty back so that Kirk can hold it, and Kirk thinks of that day in the hotel, the morning after Spock and Uhura's wedding. He wishes Chekov had been there, too. They'll take him there someday.  
  
“This isn't going to last forever, you know,” Sulu says, whispering once Chekov is asleep. “We can't expect it to, we have to be realistic. Things are going to change.”  
  
“I know,” Kirk says, though he wasn't exactly thinking along those lines. Sulu is probably right, but Chekov is so warm between them, and Sulu's eyes are slipping shut, and Kirk is having a hard time picturing a life without this fucked up thing that feels so good. Sulu cups his hand over Kirk's ear as if to apologize for being honest, but Kirk isn't sure that he doesn't just think he that is.


	12. Chapter 12

They're asleep for maybe five minutes when the emergency alarms start blaring. The response to this particular alarm has been ingrained into them since the Academy, and they all react before they're even fully awake, scrambling out of bed and finding their clothes like there are heat sensors embedded in the cloth, dressing without stopping to look at each other. Kirk grabs his communicator and dials the bridge.  
  
“An unknown assailant, Captain,” Spock says, his collected demeanor betraying nothing about the seriousness of the situation. “No demands have been made. We're attempting communication and getting no answer. The ship is taking fire.”  
  
Kirk feels it almost as soon as Spock says so, not as powerful as he feared but enough to make Sulu's flowerpots rattle on their shelf. He looks to Sulu and Chekov, who are staring at him, arms at their sides, waiting for orders.  
  
“To the bridge,” Kirk says, and they nod.  
  
“Yes, sir,” they both say at once, and as Kirk punches open the door he realizes that Sulu might have been right. This won't last forever; they could die today.  
  
It's something he always has to keep in mind, even when it doesn't seem likely, and today he's almost certain that it won't happen, Sulu and Chekov marching to the bridge beside him, steely eyed and silent, pushing their bed hair into submission as they walk. People jump aside when they see Kirk coming, pressing their backs to the walls to let him pass as the alarms continue to sound. He tries to make eye contact with each of them, giving everyone a tight nod and a quick smile, letting them know that it's under control.  
  
“Thank God they're still here,” he hears a yeoman say as the doors to the lift that will take the three of them to the bridge close, and Kirk knows that she's referring to Sulu and Chekov.  
  
“What do we know, Spock?” Kirk asks as soon as he's out of the lift, headed for his chair. Sulu and Chekov rush to the console, where the delta shift pilot and navigator hop out of their way, clapping their shoulders before taking their emergency auxiliary positions, hands clasped behind their backs, eyes on the view screen.  
  
“The weaponry appears primitive, Captain, but their numbers are many,” Spock says. “We've still had no success in communicating with our attackers.”  
  
“Uhura, what are you trying?” Kirk asks, dropping into his chair and spinning toward her station.  
  
“Standard first, then the local dialects, sir,” Uhura says.  
  
“You've broadcast the Federation seal?”  
  
“Of course, sir.”  
  
“Well, they might not recognize it out here, or care. Sulu, what are our warp chances?”  
  
“Not good, sir – the surrounding spacecraft is almost like a minefield, their approach is chaotic – I'd feel more comfortable going evasive.”  
  
“Then that's what we'll do. Chekov –”  
  
“Firing from all ports, short range only, sir,” Chekov says, his fingers flying over his side of the console, posture worse than ever as he hunches into his work.  
  
“There's nothing on the long range radar?” Kirk asks, turning to Spock, who shakes his head.  
  
“It's as if we've stumbled upon a bee hive, Captain,” Spock says, and Kirk's eyebrows shoot up. Only Spock would be metaphorical at a time like this.  
  
“Taking fire heavy down here, sir!” Scotty shouts over Kirk's communicator. “They either know what they're aiming for or they're getting very lucky.”  
  
“Sulu, can you get us out of this?” Kirk asks as a new volley of blasts rocks the hull.  
  
“Trying, sir – I'd be willing to warp if I –”  
  
“There's the Circle of Stones!” Chekov says, practically shouting. “Sir – ah, not far from here, if we could risk a warp 2, the Circle of Stones is a ring of small, uninhabited moons that once circled a planet which was destroyed, it is a singular phenomenon in the sense that–”  
  
“Ah, yes – I believe that would work, sir,” Spock says, and Chekov drops back into his seat, panting with the effort of sharing his theory. “If we could get the ship almost directly in the center of the five moons. The gravitational force there is a subject of Federation study, unclassified and dangerous to warp into, but it would effectively provide a shield while we continued to gather information on why we're being attacked here.”  
  
“Dangerous how?” Kirk asks, gripping the arms of his chair as the hull is rocked again.  
  
“If we warp into anything but the direct center of the gravitational pull that keeps the moons orbiting the space where their planet was once located, we could be shot out into space and potentially collide with a planet, a star, any number of –”  
  
“Sulu, you hear that?” Kirk says. “This is emergency parallel parking. Can you – ”  
  
“Yes, sir, I can do if I get the –”  
  
“Coordinates almost set,” Chekov says, his fingers still flying. “Captain, I'm going to fire a burst of net missiles before we warp, if –”  
  
“Yes, Ensign, good plan. Let's get those coordinates –”  
  
“Coordinates set, sir, loading missile sequence – ”  
  
“Good, Ensign, thank you. Sulu – ”  
  
“Counting down to warp,” Sulu says, his voice changing the way it always does when he says that, Kirk's mouth threatening to quirk into a smile, because they're going to pull this off, he can feel it.  
  
“Two,” Sulu says, grabbing the lever. Chekov is watching him, breathing hard, his eyes glued to Sulu's hand on the warp drive. “One.”  
  
It's a jerky maneuver, the warp and then the stall into manual control so Sulu can find the coordinates Chekov gave him. Kirk holds his breath while he waits for the ship to come to a halt, watching Sulu go tense around the controls, Chekov looking like he's ready to spring out of his seat and help him steer. When they come to a stop, nestled perfectly between the five quiet moons, attackers left behind, there's a rush of nervous breath from the bridge crew, then some laughter, a few quiet cheers.  
  
“Way to come through for us, Lieutenant,” Kirk says, walking down to clap Sulu on the back. Sulu pants out a breathless laugh, staring at the view screen, his hands still tight around the controls. “And that was some quick thinking with the net missiles, Chekov, nice way to avoid pursuit.” Kirk pats Chekov on the head, smirking when Chekov gives him a look of annoyance, then a little smile.  
  
“Thank you, sir,” Chekov says. Kirk walks back up to his chair, issuing orders to Spock and Uhura about follow-up research on the attack before dialing up Scotty on his communicator, ready to hear his damage reports. He feels like he just woke up back in his own life, and he's missed it, wants to stay here for awhile.  
  
The next six hours are exhausting but productive, with alpha crew meetings where Spock and Uhura present data about their new enemies, a primitive culture that communicates telepathically amongst themselves, which would explain their willingness to ignore Federation symbolism. After the on-ship meetings Kirk has to take video hails from Federation officials, then a tour of the damaged decks with Scotty. There were no lives lost, and the repairs should be doable without having to reroute to a space station. At the end of the day, there's only one thing for Kirk to do before he goes to Sulu's room and collapses into the bed.  
  
Sick bay is crowded, but none of the injuries sustained by the engineers on Scotty's deck are serious, just minor burns and bruises from falls. Chapel is arguing with Lieutenant Jacobs, also known as Cupcake, insisting that he submit to a full-body scan, and Kirk gives Cupcake a look that shuts down his protests as he walks past.  
  
“Thank you,” Chapel says, missing Kirk's involvement and ticking something off on her tricorder. “We wouldn't want to miss any internal bleeding – sometimes it doesn't present until it's too late.”  
  
Kirk heads into Bones' office, where Bones is hunched over his desk, staring at his data pad, scowling. When he hears the door closing he looks up, his mouth hanging open as he prepares to rip into whoever has invaded his office. His face changes when he sees Kirk, though he looks no less furious, just less inclined to bark and bitch, his mouth clamping shut.  
  
“Busy?” Kirk says, dropping into the chair across from Bones' desk.  
  
“I'm always busy.” Bones huffs. “I heard about how that stunt you bastards pulled on the bridge. Good thing you kept those two around.”  
  
“Yeah, good thing,” Kirk says, still feeling uncomfortable with whatever they've decided to do, which is some kind of sex thing so far, something Kirk wants to parlay into a cohabitation thing. He feels like he could get back to being a pretty independent, self-sufficient guy if he just knew that, back in his quarters, someone was using his soap and napping on his sofa between shifts. Sulu got him accustomed to the company, and Chekov allowed him to become properly addicted.  
  
“So the rumor that you were going to ship them off was true?” Bones says. He's studying Kirk in that fatherly way, looking like he wants to forgive him and pummel him at the same time.  
  
“It was true,” Kirk says. “I was out of my mind.”  
  
“Like that's news to me. Also heard a rumor that your mother beamed aboard,” Bones says, his frown deepening as his eyes soften. “That – uh. Any truth to that?”  
  
“Yeah.” Kirk sits back and drums on the arms of the chair, feeling like he's in principal Bones' office, but it's not so bad, answering to the one person who's always kept him honest. “She came by, uh. We talked. I never told you, but I had an older brother who died.”  
  
Bones' eyebrows shoot up, and he sits back, blowing out an astonished breath. Kirk feels bad for never having mentioned it, but he didn't really have a vocabulary for what he'd gone through until Sulu came along.  
  
“Shit,” Bones says.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“When did that happen? Not – recently?”  
  
“Oh, no, no, this was years ago. I was thirteen. He had a drug problem – Sam, my brother – and it was pretty rough on my mom, you know, considering – my dad.”  
  
“God, Jim, I'm sorry. Would it be crass if I said this explains a lot?”  
  
“Crass, sure, and nothing less than I expect from you,” Kirk says, smirking. “Anyway. It's been kind of a long day.”  
  
“So what now?” Bones says. “Sulu and Chekov, are they – doing their thing?” Bones scowls. “Does Sulu know about – you and the kid? Which, by the way, kind of trashed my whole world view?”  
  
“I know it did, but you were only seeing the skeevy side of it,” Kirk says. “Maybe that's all you're going to get out of – what I'm about to tell you, too, but, well. Pavel, you know, he's a little bit insane.”  
  
“I'm aware.”  
  
“And he sort of – has these feelings for me, you know, Sulu kind of ditched both of us, and we bonded –”  
  
“Oh, Christ, Jim,” Bones says, reaching for the whiskey.  
  
“Better pour me some, too,” Kirk says.  
  
“Don't tell me it gets worse,” Bones says as he passes Kirk a glass.  
  
“Depends on your definition of 'worse,' I guess. Chekov – he still wants to be with Sulu, he always will, they have this whole silent eye-talk language and everything – but he's sort of attached to me, too. And as you know, Sulu has found himself in the same predicament, because of the whole Chekov coming back to life thing.”  
  
“Which means what?” Bones asks, slumping forward to give Kirk his most admonishing glare, reserved for special occasions. “Don't tell me – both of them – and you –”  
  
“Yeah, Bones, that's exactly what I'm about to tell you.”  
  
Bones is blown backward by this, his shoulders smacking against his leather chair. He leaves his eyebrows raised and stares at Kirk for a long time, then downs the rest of his whiskey.  
  
“You're a piece of work,” Bones says, but he doesn't seem angry, just as if he thinks he should have seen this coming. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and sighs. “Well, I suppose I've heard of such things. Can't say I don't think it's a fool's game to try and make anything of them beyond the occasional drunken romp, but I've heard of them.”  
  
“Lots of cultures have partnerships with – multiple partners,” Kirk says, trying to defend this to himself as well. Without Sulu and Chekov close by, it feels like something he made up to shock Bones.  
  
“Not human cultures!” Bones says.  
  
“Some humans do it! There's that one whole moon colony where everybody has multiple husbands and wives because there's so much canning and tilling to do.”  
  
“Fine, Jim, fine. Go ahead, can your preserves with Sulu and till your land with Chekov. I hereby resign from warning you about potentially devastating personal decisions.”  
  
“Yeah, right.”  
  
“Well, alright, that's probably not going to stand, but for the sake of my own sanity I do sincerely vow to stay the hell away from this one.”  
  
“Fair enough.”  
  
Kirk grins and Bones just shakes his head, pouring more whiskey for both of them. Kirk has never been happier to be off shift, though there's a nervous anxiety building in his chest as he thinks about exactly what will happen when he comes through the door of Sulu's room.  
  
“Listen,” Bones says. “I was thinking – in just a couple more months, if we survive this last bitch of a galaxy, and we'll be back on Earth. Which means – Christine – I'd like to introduce her to Jo.”  
  
Bones fidgets a little the way he always does when he talks about his daughter, who he loves fiercely but from afar. Whenever she would come to visit him in the apartment Bones shared with Kirk at the Academy Bones would make her pancakes every morning and furiously backtrack when she pouted after he asked her if she thought the length of her skirt was appropriate.  
  
“I think that's a good plan,” Kirk says.  
  
“Right, so. Jo likes you a lot, for some goddamn reason, and I was wondering – whenever I decide to enact this wonderful plan, if you would come along, sort of talk Christine up and act all buddy-buddy with her, that sort of thing? Jo won't care about my opinion, not at first, but you're her dad's cool friend, and – ah, maybe it's stupid, but I think it might make a difference if we made it some kind of – group thing.”  
  
“Yeah, Bones, I'd love to,” Kirk says, more touched by this than he has any right to be. Bones stares at him for awhile, then shakes his head.  
  
“You look happy,” he says, frowning as if he's not sure that this is a good sign. Kirk grins.  
  
“I think I am,” he says. “It's weird.”  
  
“You're telling me.”  
  
Kirk leaves Bones' office and takes his time making his way down to crew quarters, stopping to chat with yeomans and ensigns and lieutenants of all types, everybody beaming at him with the kind of trust he was afraid he'd lost with that _Reliant_ stunt. He even catches Ensign York's arm as he's trying to hurry past.  
  
“You guys were impressive down on the weapons deck today,” Kirk says. “That was quick, precise work, and I appreciate it.”  
  
“Thanks, Captain,” York says, looking stunned for a moment. He smiles and tugs at the collar of his shirt. “Most of the senior staff was still on their way there by the time it was over, so I, um, helped load the net missile sequencers when the order came down.”  
  
“Well, it was a hell of a net missile sequence,” Kirk says, smiling he walks off, feeling like he did after the Nero incident, like woodland creatures are frolicking at his feet and singing his praises as he traipses through the kingdom he just saved.  
  
Then he comes to the door of Sulu's room. He stands outside for awhile, pulling at the hem of his shirt, touching the bars on his sleeve. This is still, on the most basic level, a bad idea. He's complicating his professional life, and trusting his heart to one person was painful enough; now he's cleaved it in half and offered it to an insecure fly boy and a time-traveling maniac. He grins and punches in the door code, ready to geek out for hours about every detail of the attack and response.  
  
The lights are on inside the room, but Sulu and Chekov are both fast asleep, still in their uniforms. It looks like Chekov only managed to get one boot off before he passed out, the other still on his foot, hanging over the end of the bed. Sulu is curled on his side and Chekov is flat on his stomach, drooling onto the sheets. Kirk remembers suddenly that they haven't any real rest in – what? Two years? Or is it nearly three now? Either way, he knows that he'll sleep well in this bed, and he kneels down to untie Chekov's boot and ease it off gently, trying not to wake him.  
  
“We tried to stay awake,” Sulu says, rolling onto his back when Kirk stands up to pull his own uniform off.  
  
“I appreciate the effort, Lieutenant,” Kirk says.  
  
“Quit calling me that,” Sulu says, yawning. “Unless we're on the bridge. Or, you know.”  
  
“Yeah, I know,” Kirk says, and he grins. “Lights, ten percent.”  
  
The lights dim down to a faint glow around the edges of the ceiling, and Kirk has missed this so much, sliding into bed with Sulu at the end of the day, wrapping around Chekov while he sleeps. He watches Sulu's face from around Chekov's shoulder, waiting to see what he'll do. Sulu's eyes are so heavy, and Kirk wants to kiss him, but it occurs to him as his legs curl in behind Chekov's that he's so tired he literally can't move.  
  
“It's like I knew you'd fall in love with him if I left,” Sulu says, whispering. “Like I – trusted you to? But when I came back. I don't know. I want whatever the two of you have to – involve me, somehow. I guess that's dumb and selfish.”  
  
“Actually it's more like inevitable. We mostly talked about you.”  
  
“Bullshit. Pavel said you told him about your brother.”  
  
“Well. Kind of.”  
  
“And taught him how to fight. He'd never let me teach him that, he's so bratty about fencing.”  
  
“Yeah, but he made me tell him what you looked like when you were fighting off Romulans on that drill about eighty-five times, so I'd say it's just the theoretical, competitive sword-fighting that he's not into.”  
  
“Stop talking about me,” Chekov mumbles, reaching back to touch Kirk's leg. “I'm not asleep.”  
  
“Yes, you are,” Sulu says, moving closer, kissing Chekov's face. “Mostly.”  
  
“Hikaru,” Chekov moans, fumbling to touch his face. Sulu moans softly and leans down to press a kiss over Chekov's lips. Kirk could watch them like this for hours, the way they fit together. Sulu's eyes flash up to his, and Kirk's stomach flips over, filling with slow heat. They smile at each other, and Chekov snores a little, asleep again.  
  
“So what'd you tell him?” Sulu says. “About the drill?”  
  
“I told him that the way you were that day made me dive face first into nothing, because I had to get you back.”  
  
“You would have done that for anyone.”  
  
“Maybe, but I'm still glad it was you.”  
  
“And Pavel who caught us,” Sulu says, nuzzling Chekov's face, but he's fast asleep now. Sulu reaches over to push his hand into Kirk's hair, holding his gaze, fighting to keep his eyes open.  
  
“Fucking missed you,” Kirk says, reaching over Chekov to take a handful of Sulu's shirt.  
  
“Yeah, but you had Pavel to keep you warm,” Sulu says. “All I had were those crazy-ass messages you guys sent – simultaneously, too, that freaked me out.”  
  
“I figured it would. What did his say?”  
  
“It was all this rambling stuff about you, and how you were, like – a lion with a thorn in his paw? And he was not going to be responsible for pulling it out? And then this wild hypothesizing about what went on between us while he was gone, and – I honestly spent five months just trying to make sense of it enough to write a response, and never could come up with anything. Yours was even weirder, though – something about – original sin?”  
  
Kirk laughs. “We were pretty screwed up without you,” he says. “You should keep those letters in case you ever need reminding.”  
  
Sulu's face changes, and he looks worried, so Kirk moves closer, pressing Chekov more snugly between them.  
  
“It's gonna be okay,” Kirk says. He can see the ghost of himself hiding in Sulu's eyes, waiting to be taken back. Kirk is still waiting to be made whole again, but this is close enough for now. Sulu sighs, shuts his eyes, and Kirk lets him sleep.  
  
The Grotliun system has plenty of other surprises, and the last six months of their mission are rarely routine, alarms sounding regularly and away missions going to hell in a hand basket. Kirk hasn't lost any crew in the past year and he's determined not to start, ready to wear furs and stomp through the halls like a warrior king if he has to, shoulder blades clacking against the walls of the ship as crew jumps aside to let him by. Everyone rises to the occasion, Chapel and Bones performing back to back emergency heart surgeries at one point, while the ship is under fire. Uhura becomes Kirk's go-to captain when he and Spock are both off-ship, and she's a natural, making Kirk wonder what will happen when Spock and Uhura are both offered their own ships. He doesn't want to think about that sort of change, any of them parting from each other, and he takes Sulu and Chekov on all of the away missions that he personally oversees, laughing proudly when Sulu marvels at Chekov's improved combat skills on the shuttle rides back to the ship.  
  
Sulu's room seems fated to follow the same history that Chekov's once did: it's used less and less, Sulu and Chekov's things slowly migrating into the captain's quarters until there are only a few possessions left in Sulu's room, more symbolic than functional, offering them a place to retreat to if they change their minds. There isn't much time to fret about the balance of what they're attempting, and if two of them are alone together while the third is on shift, there's no hesitation to make use of what little rec time they have. Kirk ties Chekov to the bed while Sulu is working overtime on consultations with the current scouting shuttle, and he fucks Sulu slow and quiet in the shower while Chekov uses his last hour off-shift to sleep late. He knows they have each other while he's gone, and he's glad, because he's not around enough to satisfy anyone, running on barely five hours of sleep most days.  
  
When he does sleep, it's deep and warm and perfect, one or both of them dropping into bed with him as they come off shift or already there when he slides under the blankets. Even if they're both away while he takes whatever rest he can get, the sheets smell like them, and the bed is surrounded by the evidence that they belong in it: Chekov's glass of water left behind on the bedside table, Sulu's crumpled boxers on the floor. Five hours of sleep at a time feels like more than Kirk needs, now.  
  
There's one last away mission after they make it through the Grotliun, officially on their way back to Earth. It's a lonely little planet where some seeds needed for the antidote to a common illness suffered on one of the Federation planets must be gathered over a period of two days. The job is for grunts, something Kirk expected to give to a few bored ensigns when he looked over the scheduled stops five years ago. He leaves Spock and Uhura in charge of the bridge and goes himself, bringing Sulu and Chekov with him.  
  
The planet is uninhabited and has no real name, referred to by the Federation as YRT-897. It's almost eerily quiet at first, but Kirk starts to find it peaceful once it's filled with the noise of Chekov and Sulu arguing about San Francisco.  
  
“Too crowded!” Chekov says as the three of them sit in the clearing where the seeds are harvested every three years by a Federation vessel. It's a smallish space, mossy and surrounded by the brittle bushes that contain the seeds, the sky purple-pink overhead and bugs singing whenever there's a break in their conversation. Kirk is sitting cross-legged beside one of the rough cloth bags used to gather the seeds, smiling to himself as he listens to Sulu and Chekov talk, feeling like he could do nothing more than this for a year or so, living on a compound and picking fruit, sleeping in a tent with them at night.  
  
“Every place on Earth is crowded,” Sulu says. “Except for –”  
  
“Not Vologda!” Chekov says. It's the little town where he's from, where his grandparents still run a pastry shop.  
  
“I was about to say: except for places where nobody wants to go.”  
  
“Like Riverside, Iowa,” Kirk says, turning to grin at Sulu, who smirks.  
  
“We should visit all these places when we go back to Earth, in equal parts, until the _Enterprise_ has its next mission,” Chekov says, loudly making plans for all three of them, as usual. “Is only fair.”  
  
“I don't really want to visit Riverside,” Kirk says. “If it's all the same to you guys.”  
  
“See?” Sulu says, elbowing Chekov. “You're only romantic about Vologda because you were barely there at all when you were a kid, you were in space with your parents most of the time.”  
  
“It is beautiful in the summer,” Chekov says. “Much better than San Francisco, ugh, is a dirty city.”  
  
“It's not dirty!”  
  
“Sometimes it smells very strongly of fish, Hikaru.”  
  
“Yeah, when you walk past a restaurant dumpster.” Sulu reaches out and pulls Chekov into his lap, nipping at his neck when Chekov shouts in protest. Chekov gives in and laughs, and Kirk shakes his head, turning back to his seed-picking.  
  
“I'm not a huge fan of San Francisco myself,” Kirk says. “It's okay, but – reminds me of school. We should go north a little bit, across the bridge – or south. To wine country or something.”  
  
“I _hate_ wine country,” Chekov says, and Sulu laughs, tickling his fingers under Chekov's shirt until he squirms and shouts with laughter.  
  
“Oh, yeah,” Kirk says. “Well, I'll be busy as shit, anyway. You guys go wherever you want.”  
  
“No, _keptin_ , you need a holiday!” Chekov says, pulling free from Sulu and walking over to Kirk on his knees. He dumps himself onto Kirk's back and wraps his arms around Kirk's neck. Kirk would reprimand him for getting distracted if he hadn't hoped that the away mission would be like this: quiet and slow-paced, nobody firing at them, nothing suddenly popping out of a stone-silent swamp and trying to bite Sulu's leg off.  
  
“I only get two weeks off before I have to report to headquarters for a month of 'intensive briefing,'” Kirk says. “And after that I hope to have new marching orders.”  
  
“Well, we'll do something together for those two weeks, yeah?” Chekov says. “Vologda, maybe? Do you like pastries?”  
  
“And we'll hang around while you're being intensively briefed,” Sulu says, dragging himself over to them. He moans and rests his elbow on Kirk's shoulder, weighing his bag of seeds in his hand. “We'll, you know, get a nice hotel room near the Fed headquarters, and when you're done with your meetings we'll order room service, give you back rubs or something.”  
  
“Or something,” Chekov says, one hand sneaking down between Kirk's legs.  
  
“No pawing me while we're on duty,” Kirk says, turning back to kiss him. “Save it for the tent.”  
  
They spend another two hours collecting seeds, Chekov and Sulu continuing their argument about San Francisco. Kirk can't keep a smile off his face as he thinks about the month of intensive briefing that he'd been dreading, coming through the door of a hotel suite after the hell of answering to higher ups and finding Chekov and Sulu in various states of undress, Chekov pouncing all over him to report the eight thousand new time travel theories he's developed during the day and Sulu pushing a beer into his hand. He wonders if they can get a room like the one he shared with Sulu when Spock and Uhura got married, with a little pool on the patio.  
  
At night, they make a fire and cook a real dinner with the rations they've brought for the mission, some kind of soup invented by Sulu that's actually pretty good. He throws a few seeds in for medicinal purposes; they're supposed to be good for the immune system. Tomorrow, they'll fill three more bags with seeds before beaming back up to the ship and beginning the two-week journey home. Kirk will have a lot to do, preparations for the completion of the mission, tying up loose ends with promotion requests and network upgrades, plus a backlog of screenwork from the past two days. He lets out a long breath as he reclines inside the tent after dinner, his back aching from the seed collecting.  
  
Chekov is the first one inside the tent, and he straddles Kirk's hips, leaning down to kiss his cheeks while Sulu finishes cataloging the spindly plant samples he collected by the last light from the setting sun.  
  
“I like it when you have this,” Chekov says, rubbing his cheeks against Kirk's stubble. “Feels good, ah, you know. Down there.”  
  
“Trying to tell me to blow you?” Kirk asks with a laugh, his hand pushing up under Chekov's uniform shirt. This is their second night on this planet, and it will be hard to top what went on in the tent last night, Kirk fucking Sulu into Chekov's mouth, the sight of this as he looked down over Sulu's shoulder so good that he's pretty sure he had some kind of multiple, many-layered orgasm.  
  
“ _Keptin_ ,” Chekov says, sitting up straight and lowering his voice. “You will – try to keep us together, yes? For the next mission?”  
  
“Of course,” Kirk says. “You two are my helm for as long as I can hang on to you.”  
  
“If they offered me a promotion I would not go,” Chekov says, his face growing serious. “Even if it was my own ship. I need time for my independent research, and I would hate to have to approve supply orders and make speeches.”  
  
“Well,” Kirk says, swallowing heavily, trying to hide his immense relief. “Good. 'Cause I'm always going to want you around.”  
  
“And Hikaru will go wherever I go, of course, so there's no worry there,” Chekov says, barely able to finish before Kirk has wrestled his smart ass to the ground, making Chekov shout with laughter.  
  
“You guys are going to knock the tent over,” Sulu says, poking his head inside. Kirk has Chekov mostly pinned, but he's putting up a good fight, kicking and shaking with laughter as Kirk disarms him by tickling his sides.  
  
“He's cheating, Hikaru,” Chekov says, squirming. “Hands under the shirt is against the rules—ah, _keptin_!”  
  
“Are you going to call me _keptin_ for the rest of your life?” Kirk asks, relenting so that Chekov can catch his breath.  
  
“Yes,” Chekov says, and Sulu laughs, grabbing Kirk's arms and holding them behind his back to allow Chekov to escape.  
  
“Ha,” Chekov says, helping Sulu press Kirk down onto his back. “Try to escape now, hmm?”  
  
Kirk doesn't mind behind held down while they both kiss his neck, Sulu's hand traveling up under his shirt while Chekov's snakes between his legs. They pause in their efforts to debauch him and lean over Kirk's mouth to kiss each other, wet and sloppy before they find their rhythm. Kirk loves being able to watch them like this, to see the way Chekov's boasting retreats as Sulu claims his mouth. Chekov's eyes are lidded and blown when they flutter open to look at Sulu, who grins.  
  
“Gonna fuck you so hard, baby,” Sulu promises, giving Chekov one more quick kiss. Kirk spreads his legs, his cock growing harder at the thought of watching Chekov brace himself on the hard ground while Sulu takes his ass.  
  
“Yes, Hikaru,” Chekov says. “But let me do one thing.” He tugs Kirk's pants open, pushes his briefs down, and Sulu watches for awhile, scooting up to kiss Kirk while Chekov sucks him off, neither of them able to go very long without peeking back down to watch Chekov moan for the cock he's sucking. Kirk is already making plans to suck Chekov off while Sulu fucks him as he comes down Chekov's throat, opening his mouth for a hard, wet kiss from Sulu, both of them sucking the breath from him.  
  
Later, with the taste of Chekov's come on his tongue and the sated awareness that his own is leaking from Sulu – he couldn't resist, seeing Sulu panting and weak after pushing his own orgasm into Chekov – Kirk folds himself into the mess of sleeping bags that they've zipped together. Sulu moans and glues himself to Kirk's back, and Kirk hopes with his whole childish, needful heart that he'll get to sleep in between them tonight. Chekov is in the middle most often, either because he's the smallest or because he grew up as a spoiled only child, but occasionally Sulu and Kirk need it, too, and Chekov seems to recognize that tonight, squeezing up against Kirk's chest as Sulu wraps around Kirk's back.  
  
“Last away mission of the five-year haul,” Kirk says, turning his head to receive Sulu's tired kisses against his cheek. “Hard to believe.”  
  
“That's not the hardest thing to believe,” Sulu says, pressing his legs in more tightly behind Kirk's.  
  
“Eh, stranger things have happened,” Kirk says.  
  
“Yes, like me coming back from the dead,” Chekov says.  
  
“That's a story for the grandkids for sure,” Kirk says, and Sulu snorts.  
  
“Don't even say that,” he says.  
  
“We'll just avoid planets known for spontaneous gender-bending in the planning stages of our next mission,” Kirk says. "That should eliminate any threat of – grandkids."  
  
“Ah, but men can still get pregnant in space!” Chekov says, his head popping up the way it always does when he feels he has a particularly salient point to make.  
  
“That's an old wives' tale,” Sulu says.  
  
“No!” Chekov says. “A real thing! Riley told me that it happened to his cousin's friend.”  
  
“Bones says it's impossible,” Kirk says.  
  
“The doctor doesn't know everything,” Chekov says, shrinking down against Kirk again, as if he's afraid Bones will hear this somehow.  
  
“Let's cross the space pregnancy bridge when we come to it,” Kirk says, rubbing his face against Chekov's curls, ready to drop off to sleep. “I think we've got enough complications to deal with as it is.”  
  
“Complications,” Chekov says with a scoff, because he refuses to see this arrangement as anything out of the ordinary. He's started talking about it openly with people on the ship, much to Kirk and Sulu's embarrassment, though they don't really have the right to ask him to be discreet. It's true that so far it's been pretty straightforward: sex and companionship, laughs and drinks after their shifts, meals together with the rest of the alpha crew. Kirk feels little pangs of jealousy sometimes, but so far it's been nothing worse than what he feels when Bones ditches him to hang out with Chapel or Uhura takes Spock's side in a discussion about intergalactic politics. Kirk still keeps a few things sacred with both of them – the gym sex with Chekov and making out among the blue flowers with Sulu – and he knows they have some things together that they don't share with him, but he can live with that, at least for now.  
  
“He laughs,” Sulu whispers in Kirk's ear when Chekov is snoring against Kirk's chest. “But just how am I supposed to introduce you two to my sisters? Jesus – to my parents?”  
  
“I don't know,” Kirk says. “I've been wondering what Pavel's old man will think about all this.”  
  
“God, are you kidding? He's like Pavel, he's so matter of fact, he'll just shrug it off. My parents – shit, they gave me this big speech before I left Earth about how I shouldn't let my cultural and planetary values get lost in the shuffle up in space.”  
  
“You could just not tell them,” Kirk says.  
  
“Yeah, but – then what do I do at, like, Christmas?”  
  
Kirk laughs and reaches back to cup Sulu's cheek, his eyes actually watering a little, because he fucking loves Sulu for already being worried about Christmas, and for returning every part of Kirk that he ever took away, patched up and polished and better than before.  
  
“Sorry I stole your planetary values from you,” Kirk says.  
  
“That's okay,” Sulu says, pressing closer as the wind howls through the bushes outside, his hand sliding over Kirk's side to rest on Chekov's shoulder. “You can have 'em.”


	13. Epilogue

Bones waits two more years and several short-term missions before proposing to Chapel. She's been accepted by Joanna, who was nowhere near as judgmental about her as Bones expected, though Kirk still jokingly credits his presence at that first introductory lunch for Chapel and Joanna's friendship. The wedding is scheduled for a three week period before the _Enterprise_ 's mission to the Dunyet galaxy, where they'll lead a multi-faceted research effort and hopefully gain some political clout with the powerful empire that rules most of the galaxy. Conveniently, the wedding also falls just a week after Chapel's completion of her MD, something that was put off by the Nero conflict and then her determination to participate on the five-year mission. The whole week is full of celebratory parties and elaborate wedding preparations, and when Kirk calls Chapel up to congratulate her she sounds a little crazed.   
  
“This isn't going to screw up our relationship, is it?” Chapel says. “Me being a doctor as well? We always joked that I might as well have been one, but now I actually am, and I'm a very competitive person, and he still outranks me, but –”  
  
“Man, relax,” Kirk says, laughing into his communicator. “You've been with Bones for six years. You can handle anything.”  
  
“But he was with his ex for eleven years –”  
  
“Yeah, and she was a cat breeder. Trust me, it's going to help you guys that you have doctoring in common, not hurt.”   
  
“I know,” Chapel says, groaning. “I'm just nervous. You're lucky you'll never have to go through this.”   
  
“Right,” Kirk says, laughing. It stings a little, but he's not sure why. It's not like he wants the pomp and ritual, the fuss that gets made or the labels that come with it. Sometimes, though, he wants a word for Sulu and Chekov that isn't just a threesome joke. He's been with them – and even that feels inaccurate somehow, _with them_ , as if it's more or less than that – for over two years now, and it's as comfortably automatic as any relationship he's ever had, like family and friendship and more, all the best stuff. They'll never stand up in front of all the people who care about them and make some inadequate remarks about their feelings for and commitment to each other. Two years later, Kirk isn't even sure how committed they really are. He knows that as long as he's their captain, they'll follow him, but sometimes he wonders what would happen if Chekov decided to retire and devote all his time to his research, or if Sulu was blinded on an away mission and had to give up flying, something that almost happened last year.   
  
Kirk is Bones' best man, and on the night before the wedding he's expected to make a toast at the rehearsal dinner. Kirk has made hundreds of toasts and speeches and public remarks over his eight year career, but he's nervous about this one, drinking too much champagne and hanging close to Sulu while Chekov tries to learn some weird Orion dance from Gaila, who is one of Chapel's bridesmaids.   
  
“You alright?” Sulu asks as Kirk flags down a waiter and grabs his fourth glass of champagne.   
  
“I don't know,” Kirk says. “I have some – notes, but what the hell do I know about marriage?”  
  
“You're worried about the toast?” Sulu laughs. “Why? Just rip on Bones a little and then get sentimental at the end. That's what everyone's expecting, not some keynote speech on matrimony.”  
  
“Do you still think you'll never get married?” Kirk asks, turning to Sulu and grabbing his arm, a little drunk already. He did pre-game some vodka with Chekov back in their hotel room; he'd forgotten about that, should probably ease up on the champagne.   
  
“No, Jim, I changed my mind,” Sulu says, rolling his eyes. “I'm going to marry Pavel, you can be my best man. What are you, joking? Of course I'll never get married.”   
  
“But is it only because there are two of us? Or because you really don't believe in it?”  
  
Sulu laughs. “Okay, you're drunk.”  
  
“I'm serious, Hikaru, I – I'm gonna be forty someday, if I don't get roasted alive by Klingons –”  
  
“Hey – don't – don't joke about that. Too soon, not cool.” Sulu shoots him a wounded look, shifting his seat.   
  
“Sorry,” Kirk says, and he slips his arm around the back of Sulu's chair. It already seems like a long time ago to Kirk, though he supposes it was just about five months. He really thought he was going to die, so close to the flame they threatened him with that he could vividly imagine what it would feel like to watch the skin melt away from his bones. He thought about Sulu and Chekov, how they would have each other when he was gone and how everyone should function this way, keeping a spare on hand. They were both on the team that rescued him, and in battle Sulu became that person Kirk remembered from the drill, killing like it was choreographed in his bones, wiping blood from his mouth after beheading the Klingon who rushed him. Chekov seemed kind of scared of Sulu after seeing him like that, hovering close to Kirk, but as soon as they were in bed together Chekov was ravenous for Sulu, worshiping him while Kirk held Sulu in his lap, not willing to let him go.   
  
When it's time for Kirk to give his toast, he stands on wobbly legs and looks down at Sulu, who gives him a little smile, telling him to calm down. They have their own eye-talk language now, and Kirk has one with Chekov, too, a slightly different dialect, most of their signals involving imminent sex and exasperated commiseration when Sulu annoys them.   
  
“What can I say about Bones?” Kirk says when the room quiets for him. A somewhat inauspicious start. The restaurant where the rehearsal dinner is being held is glowing with warm light, crowded with Bones' and Chapel's families, along with many people Kirk knows from the _Enterprise_ , his own extended family.  
  
“When I first met Bones, he was going through a somewhat – transitional stage in his life,” Kirk says, drawing a soft twitter of laughter from those in the room who know what he's talking about. “Probably the last place he wanted to be was space, so naturally that's where he headed, threatening to throw up on me when I sat next to him on our Academy shuttle.” More laughter. Kirk looks over at Bones, who is seated at a table in the middle of the room, looking exhausted from all the attention, but happy, too, because his arm is around Chapel, who is glowing as she beams at Kirk, waiting for his next joke. Another reason they're tying the knot now, aside from the between-mission, post-MD timing, is that she's two months pregnant, but not many people in this room know that yet. Kirk is probably the only one other than Chapel herself who knows that it was planned, something that Bones would never admit to out loud, because it would ruin his reputation as the kind of guy who doesn't love anything as irrational as children.  
  
“I hope you won't take this as a rip about your age, buddy,” Kirk says, and there's some anticipatory laughter, Bones raising one eyebrow. “But, um. Well, I wasn't lucky enough to know my father, and while you've been my best friend, drinking buddy, and partner in crime for a long time, you've also been a kind of father figure to me, and I'd venture to say that you would have filled that role in my life even if you were only a year older than me. You're an old soul, Bonsey, and I've – needed that in my life more than once, so just – thanks, man.” Kirk's voice is thinning out, and he doesn't like the sympathetic smiles from the crowd, kind of wants them to stay out of it. He ignores them, focusing on Bones.   
  
“Here's to a happy marriage for two amazing crew members and two great friends of mine,” Kirk says, finishing up quick. Bones is smiling at him, just one corner of his mouth quirked as he pulls his arm from Chapel's shoulders to raise his glass and drink along with the others. Kirk hurries to sit down, embarrassed, sure that he articulated that poorly but still glad that he finally said it. Sulu's hand slides over Kirk's thigh under the table, and Chekov falls to sit at Kirk's other side, hugging his shoulders.   
  
“Good toast,” Chekov says.   
  
“Yep,” Sulu says, patting Kirk's knee, and the choked-up feeling in Kirk's throat clears away. He grins and drains his champagne glass.   
  
“You guys want to hear a secret?” he says, and Sulu and Chekov draw in close. Uhura stops in front of their table to take a picture just as this happens, and Kirk gives her a look.   
  
“I'll send you a copy,” she says, winking. “Though I really should have taken a video – they both did this eager little lean toward you at the same time, it was really cute.”   
  
“Don't call Pavel cute, he's sensitive about that,” Kirk says, and she laughs and walks off. Chekov tugs on Kirk's tie.  
  
“Very funny,” he says. “Now what is this secret?”  
  
Kirk tells them about the pregnancy and they both lean back, laughing with the thrill of good gossip before punching his shoulders and asking him why he didn't tell them sooner. Kirk makes them promise not to tell anyone else, and spends the rest of the dinner huddled up with them and muttering about how hilarious Bones wrangling an infant will be, occasionally breaking the huddle so he can look up and accept praise for his toast when people offer it. The only one he really wants to hear this from is Bones, who manages to fight his way free and wander over toward the end of the dinner.   
  
“Well, if isn't the three musketeers,” Bones says, Chekov wilting a little under his scrutiny while Sulu sits up straighter.   
  
“I hope you'll sit us at the same table with your ultra-conservative grandmother tomorrow,” Kirk says, slinging one arm around Sulu and the other around Chekov. “That would make for some lively dinner conversation, I think.”   
  
“You're sitting with the rest of the alpha-shift clowns and you know it,” Bones says. “We've got the quarantine area all set up. I appreciate the toast, by the way.” Kirk knows Bones doesn't want to get sentimental in front of Sulu and Chekov, but he catches the change in his eyes, and grins.   
  
“Don't mention it,” Kirk says, saluting him.   
  
The party breaks up shortly before midnight, the bridesmaids ushering Chapel away for tradition's sake. Kirk and the other groomsmen see Bones safely back to his own hotel room, and Kirk sticks around for a drink, but makes himself scarce as soon as he's finished, giving Bones a wave. Bones shoots him an understanding look; most of his other groomsmen are brothers and very old friends, and they're getting rowdy and drunk already, telling stories about their childhood in Georgia, dissolving into laughter before the first five words are out.   
  
Kirk walks down the hall, annoyed by the brightness of the lights and hoping he won't be too hungover in the morning. He finds the room he's sharing with Sulu and Chekov and keys open the door, hoping that they'll be too tired to fuck until he sees them spread out on the bed, Sulu on his back and Chekov stretched alongside him, propped up on one elbow, laughing softly and teasing his fingers over Sulu's lips. They're both naked, and they turn toward Kirk expectedly when he walks in, pulling off his tie.   
  
“I hope you two are finished, because I'm damn tired,” Kirk says, actually hoping for the opposite but not wanting them to feel guilty if they couldn't wait.  
  
“We haven't even started yet,” Sulu says.  
  
“Leave your suit on,” Chekov says when Kirk starts undoing the buttons on his shirt.   
  
So Kirk blindfolds Chekov with his tie, pulls his cock out of his suit pants and fucks him while still fully dressed, something Chekov has apparently wanted all night. Sulu lifts up the tail of Kirk's untucked shirt and pushes into him while he's still inside Chekov, both of them holding on to the headboard while Sulu's thrusts rock Kirk harder into Chekov. Kirk knew it was a pretty well-tailored suit, but he's still impressed by how badly they both seem to have longed for this as that dinner went on and on, Sulu pressing curses to the back of Kirk's neck while he slams into him and Chekov moaning in a desperate, unbroken wail, his come splattering the headboard seconds after Kirk starts to jerk him.   
  
They're in a heap afterward, Sulu and Chekov slowly undressing Kirk, undoing buttons and pulling off his fancy dress socks, helping him out of his pants. Kirk is delirious with the aftermath of his powerful climax, wanting to kiss both of them at once and doing the best he can with only one set of lips, drawing them both down to him.   
  
“Never going anywhere,” Sulu whispers into Kirk's mouth, and Kirk wonders why for a moment before remembering his drunken fretting about marriage during the dinner. He smiles and shakes his head, dismissing it.   
  
“I can't believe Christine is pregnant,” Chekov says, sounding a little envious, and Kirk doesn't want to think about that right now, or Chekov's possibly-related fascination with urban legends about space pregnancy, so he rolls onto his side and closes his eyes, wishing he'd had some water before bed but too worn out to get any now.   
  
“Oh, wait!” Chekov says as Sulu is curling around Kirk, pulling him to his chest. “I almost forgot – I went to the city this afternoon while you two were busy.”   
  
“Yeah?” Sulu says, reaching over tug on one of Chekov's curls. Kirk had to play golf with McCoy and his brothers in the afternoon, and Sulu went to see some orchid exhibit at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, but Chekov insisted on sight-seeing.   
  
“How was it?” Kirk asks. He's seen plenty of Atlanta over the years, thanks to Bones, and he finds it to be as dully comfortable as any other Earth city.   
  
“It was okay,” Chekov says. “There was a street market – look what I found.” He scrambles over the to table beside the bed, where a little paper shopping bag rests. Kirk noticed it when he was getting dressed for the rehearsal dinner and thought it was some kind of goodie bag left in the hotel rooms for out of town guests. Chekov pulls a small drawstring bag from it and sits naked on the bed, opening it while Sulu and Kirk tip their chins up to see what's in it.   
  
“This is a style now on Earth, I guess,” Chekov says, dumping three silver rings into his palm. “You wear one ring on your pinkie finger, one on your index finger, and one on your thumb. Stupid, like any fashion, but I saw these and I thought – here, let's see.”   
  
He takes Sulu's hand and laughs in delight when the mid-sized ring fits on Sulu's ring finger. Sulu looks down at it, turning his hand over while Chekov grabs Kirk's hand and slips the biggest ring onto Kirk's ring finger. It fits easily, just snug enough to stay in place.   
  
“Now if mine doesn't fit I'll be sad!” Chekov says, but his fingers are slender, and the pinkie-sized ring that matches this set is big enough to slip over his ring finger. He grins, holding his hand up for examination, then looks down at Kirk and Sulu, who have turned onto their stomachs, their mouths hanging open, ringed hands flattened onto the bedspread.   
  
“Perfect,” Chekov says. “They weren't very expensive, but I don't think I would have been able to return them if they didn't fit. Well, good night!” He kisses Sulu sharply on his nose, then kisses Kirk in the same spot, and shoves his feet under the blankets. Kirk looks over at Sulu, and then back to Chekov, who has turned onto his side, smack in the middle of the bed, sighing as he settles in for sleep.   
  
“Night,” Kirk says, understanding that Chekov is only pretending to have done what he just did on a whim. Kirk kisses Sulu and crawls up to slip under the blankets himself, pulling Chekov into his arms and waiting for Sulu to follow his lead. Sulu still seems kind of stunned, maybe because he really did think he would never get married, but eventually he translates Kirk's eye-speak and scoots up to wrap himself around Chekov's back, snuggling down under the blankets.   
  
“Goodnight,” Sulu says softly, kissing the back of Chekov's head, his eyes locked on Kirk's. Chekov still has his eyes closed, but he smiles, and Kirk was watching for it, doesn't miss it. Kirk finds Sulu's arm under the blankets and wraps his hand around the dip just before the bulge of Sulu's bicep, one of his hundred favorite things about Sulu's body. Chekov shifts between them, pushing his ass back against Sulu's hips and threading one of his legs through Kirk's.   
  
“I love how he just – did that,” Kirk says when he's sure Chekov is asleep, his body gone soft in the valley between Kirk's and Sulu's, which is where Chekov belongs, even if that means they spoil him.   
  
“Without asking us, I mean,” Kirk says, putting his chin on top of Chekov's head, where Sulu's is already resting. Sulu grins.  
  
“Me too,” he says. “I loved it.”  
  
He seems surprised, and content, and when he finds Kirk's hand under the pillow that Chekov's head is resting on, Kirk can feel the cool metal of that ring. He squeezes Sulu's arm, knowing he can feel the same thing, that new weight.   
  
Kirk doesn't want to dream their future, doesn't want to know the details, but it's hard not to on a night like this. He'll live past forty, though not long past it, and Chekov will get his baby, though not the way he thinks he will. There's a war; Kirk tries to pull back, doesn't want to know. He's aware that he won't remember when he wakes, but he doesn't want this deeper, deja-vu type knowledge living in him. He sees Sulu crying, knee-deep in blue flowers, gray hair over his ears, and can hear Chekov calling the girl who was orphaned after the battle that killed his captain and many others 'Jimmy,' her blond pigtails bouncing as she lets her adoptive father scoop her into his arms. He sees Ensign York getting his own ship and Chapel letting the pirate who kills Bones die on the operating table and Joanna McCoy flying the _Enterprise_.   
  
He sees his brother, who tells him it will be okay. Sam is still sixteen, and Kirk is thirteen when he stands beside him, looking not down but at all around at the things that will happen to the people he loves, unless the stars realign.   
  
“Did you know?” he asks his brother, taking Sam's hand, surprised that he's glad to be smaller than Sam again. “Before you died – did you know how it would end?”  
  
“No – or, sort of,” Sam says, squinting as if he's having trouble remembering. “That last time I got high, when I started to know that I wasn't going to come back down, I saw you and Mom, the way you helped her make my room black, and the way you tried to turn into me but couldn't, because you were too good. I thought I saw Dad, all these amazing things he would have done as a captain if he'd survived, but now I know – that was you.”  
  
“I'm going to wake up,” Kirk says, panicked, not sure what to make of this or what he could do with it even if he did remember it. He turns to his brother, tugging on his arm, unable to believe that Sam was ever this tall, taller than that tower that he climbed. “Tell me something, Sammy, please – something that will make me feel better.”  
  
Sam looks down at him, frowning slightly, and it's clear to Kirk in the moment that Sam has been dead for so long that he has to think hard about what would comfort someone who can still be bothered by the finality of the stage of existence that he let go of long ago. He seems to settle on something, smiles, and leans down to whisper in Kirk's ear:  
  
“They'll never take off those rings.”   
  
*  
  
Kirk wakes up without a hangover, which is weird. Sulu and Chekov are still fast asleep, both of them untangled from him and each other, Chekov on his stomach and Sulu on his back, his lips parted as he breathes through them nosily. Kirk looks around, that old goosebump feeling that he used to get when he had nightmares about his brother rising across his neck, though he doesn't feel the pang of panic that he did back then. The room is dark except for a few lines of sunlight that are peeking in around the outline of the heavy curtains, but as Kirk's eyes adjust he can't find anything out of place. He looks down at the ring on his finger and smiles.   
  
Showering together is overrated, so he jumps in for his before they can wake, glad for the extra elbow room. Sometimes they're all late for shift and they have to shove into the one in Kirk's quarters together, which almost always makes for an irritating start to the day, though there is the rare occasion when one of them wants to turn the cramped confines into something sexy and the others go along with it. Kirk is still fucked-out from last night and doesn't even jerk off under the water, just lets his morning wood sink. He thinks about getting old and grins, then the thought bugs him a little, and he tries to snatch at the nagging remnants of whatever he dreamed about last night – something about gray hair? He never remembers his dreams anymore, which is mostly a blessing.   
  
“Did you bring my deodorant?” Sulu asks, walking into the bathroom and startling him. Kirk finishes rinsing the suds out of his hair and turns off the water.  
  
“Uh, no,” Kirk says. “I brought mine. You can use it if you forgot yours.”   
  
“Jim, God, if you're gonna pack your own stuff from the bathroom why don't you pack mine, too?”   
  
Kirk grins as he's coming out of the shower, withholding a joke about truly feeling married now. He wraps a towel around his waist and swats Sulu's bare ass, which is bent out in a tantalizing fashion as he hunts through the bag of toiletries on the counter.  
  
“There's a replicator at the end of the hall,” Kirk offers. “If replicators can even fashion something as delicately molecule-d as your designer deodorant.”  
  
“It's not – designer, it's organic, and the other kind gives you tumors.”   
  
“Yeah, well, I'd rather have a tumor hypospray'd out than use a deodorant with magical flower petals floating in it.”   
  
“How do you get 'magical' from organic?” Sulu asks, scowling at Kirk as he loops his arms around Sulu's waist and rests his chin on his shoulder. They watch each other in the mirror for a minute, and Kirk is going for Sulu's ear with his mouth when something stops him, some other half-memory of a dream, gray hair –   
  
“What's wrong?” Sulu asks, when he sees Kirk's face change. Kirk isn't sure how to answer, or why he suddenly feels like he's been punched in the chest. He jumps when Chekov stomps into the bathroom behind them.  
  
“Why do you get up so early?” Chekov asks, looking like a creature who normally dwells underground as he blinks his puffy eyes against the bathroom lights. “And why do you make such _noise_ when you do – I am supposed to be on a vacation!” He turns on the shower and looks back at them with accusation, his shoulders hunched as he scratches irritably at the back of one hand. Kirk and Sulu both start laughing hard at the same time, and Kirk forgets whatever half-formed anxiety he'd been hunting down.   
  
“What is funny?” Chekov asks, picking up a hand towel and snapping it at them.   
  
“You,” Sulu says, hugging Kirk against him while they both shake with laughter. “Your righteous indignation.”   
  
“I hate you both,” Chekov says, so pathetically that they both laugh harder, and Chekov retreats into the shower, slamming the door behind him. Sulu follows him in, and Kirk shaves at the sink, listening to Chekov pout slowly back to life as Sulu washes him. He's happy enough to feel it like an extra organ in his chest, filtering contentment into his bloodstream like a champ, working alongside his worry-worn heart and battle-tested lungs.   
  
Chekov is in a much better mood an hour later, dressed in only his briefs and chowing down on his room service French toast, sitting by the window as he talks about the last wedding ceremony they all attended together, which was Chekov's parents' second marriage, last year on Beauxton-5.   
  
“What did we get these two for a gift?” Chekov asks. He's sitting on the windowsill, his knees tucked to his chest and his forehead pressed to the glass as he watches swallows flit by in the early morning light.   
  
“What, you didn't get them anything during your shopping trip yesterday?” Kirk asks, pretending to be shocked and winking at Sulu, who rolls his eyes.  
  
“Ha ha,” Chekov says, not even turning from the window.  
  
“We got them a Romulan ale decanter,” Kirk says. “A very rare artifact that I lifted from one of the ten remaining Romulan warlords in the galaxy. I thought it was appropriate, you know, to honor the fact that Bones got me in on the crew's original Romulan adventure – thereby saving the world.”  
  
“Only because I didn't let that one Romulan kick you off the side of the drill,” Sulu says.   
  
“And because I broke protocol to save you both,” Chekov says, still watching the road outside the hotel as if the hovercraft that pass by are fascinating.   
  
“Alright, alright,” Kirk says. “I'm never going to live needing to be bailed out in the midst of my single-handed world saving down, am I?”  
  
“It's not like it's the only time we've bailed you out,” Sulu says with a snort, and Chekov laughs, his mouth full of French toast. Kirk walks to him and leans down to lick some brown sugar from the corner of his lips.   
  
“Get dressed,” he says, tugging on a curl. “We'll be late.”  
  
“Yes, _keptin_ ,” Chekov says, his mouth still full, but he doesn't budge.   
  
Kirk at least is on time, leaving the two of them up in the room to putz around on their PADDs until the ceremony begins. He sees them filing in toward the back, and smirks when Chekov waves and Sulu grabs his hand, pulling it down. Kirk is standing beside Bones at the altar, Bones' brothers lined up behind him, all looking miserably hungover. Bones himself looks overly serious, his posture too perfect as he watches the door that Chapel will emerge from.   
  
“I think I had some kind of awful nightmare last night,” Kirk says, something unnameable still troubling him.   
  
“Jim.” Bones glances back at him. “Is now really the time?”  
  
“What? We've got a couple of minutes before the wedding march starts. Tell me – do you think we can talk to the dead in our dreams? Or see the future? I'm inclined to believe no, but sometimes I'm not so sure.”   
  
Bones gives Kirk a look like he will eat him alive if he says another word. Kirk holds up his hands and makes an apologetic face. The soothing, pre-ceremony music draws to a close, and Kirk can see the swish of purple skirts below the drawn curtains that cover the French doors at the end of the aisle, a flash of Gaila's green ankles. Bones sighs and shakes his head.  
  
“What the hell kind of dream was this?” he asks, muttering low, like they're talking during a lecture.   
  
“I don't know,” Kirk says. “Bad? But then again – not really? I think it was the ambivalence of the thing that freaked me out. There's wisdom in ambivalence, and I'd hate to ignore some kind of – portent, or ghost advice, or what have you.”   
  
“Here I am on my wedding day, talking ghost advice with Jim Kirk,” Bones says, looking up toward the sky.   
  
“I guess what I'm asking is – do you believe in an afterlife? Because if I decide that I do, I think I have to consider that something really strange and important visited me in my sleep last night, but if I don't, that means I can ignore this creepy feeling I've had since then – like I've been here before, and like I'm going to get to come back, somehow, eventually?”   
  
“Ask your boyfriend the time-traveler,” Bones says. “Sounds like a problem for him, not me.”   
  
“Nah, this is not a physics thing, it's metaphysical thing. You've never exactly been my spiritual advisor, but, well, it's your wedding day, and we've got these five or six seconds to kill, and I figured I'd get your opinion.”   
  
Bones turns to look at him then, and Kirk rears back a little, feeling as if Bones is going to threaten to pull the car over if Kirk says another word. He narrows his eyes.  
  
“Here's what I think, Jim,” Bones says, teeth gritted. “Heaven or hell, God or oblivion, ghost advice or schizophrenic hallucinations, you've come this far and it's starting to look like you're gonna be okay. Okay?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“Okay,” Bones says, nodding once, then music starts, and the French doors open. Kirk turns toward them, scanning the crowd until he finds Sulu and Chekov at the back, Chekov craning his neck to see the altar and Sulu taking a picture with his PADD, and he knows that Bones is right, can feel it from the top of his head to the tips of his shoes as the wind picks up and the music swells. He's going to keep all his ghosts, and the two hearts he was given in exchange for his own, and wherever he goes from here, they'll keep him warm under the blankets of any bed he can find.   
  
  


***


End file.
